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  • TomThomson (6/1/2015)


    GoofyGuy (6/1/2015)


    That happy situation probably applies only to database developers in companies who are developing databases for in-house use only.

    Indeed, as Mr Russell explained to me already (twice).

    😉

    Well, he allowed ISVs.

    But itt actually applies to some other businesses too. Most of my working life was with ICL, who certainly weren't an ISV but certainly did have most of the issues I mentioned; some was with CTL, who also weren't an ISV and also had these problems (albeit to a lesser extent), and some was with Neos Interactive which was partly an ISV but mostly a provider of entertainment (films, music, TV) and had most of the local/individual customer problems in all aspects of the business. So the vast majority of my experience is in firms which suffered all the problems that Mr Russel claims are only suffered by ISVs, despite none of those firms being ISVs.

    I do hit snags when trying the figure out why the UAT database instance doesn't function the same as development or production, especially regarding how it inerops with external resources like web services, file shares, or ETL processes. That can happen in any IT organization. Still, I'd much rather debug why an instance of SQL Server isn't seeing a network folder (15 minute fix) than I would be tasked with debugging why a web application won't run on the latest version of Chrome.

    "Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Instead, seek what they sought." - Matsuo Basho

  • That's what is nice about being an in-house IT department, the environment is the same throughout and we write code for ourselves. We don't have to worry about our code running on other environments because there aren't any.

  • GoofyGuy (6/1/2015)


    That happy situation probably applies only to database developers in companies who are developing databases for in-house use only.

    Indeed, as Mr Russell explained to me already (twice).

    😉

    You write to the highest common denominator and in many cases that will be perfectly acceptable. The tricky bit comes when the queries become more complex and therefore the query optimisers in each platform approach the query in different ways.

    I can remember the early days of content management systems when some multi-platform systems had very different performance characteristics because something that ran fine on ORACLE ran like a dog on SQL Server and vice verse.

    I'd like to see a software vendor publish a spec for their DB interactions and allow RDBMS specific implementations to be added to the product. Let's suppose you had a folder structure that had the application queries categorise into "generic", "RDBMS x", "RDBMS y" etc. If someone wanted to use the tool on "RDBMS z" then provided they implemented the queries themselves and were prepared to support it themselves they could do.

    Perhaps a partially open-source model would work. You couldn't see the app source code but you could see the queries it would run.

    To give an example let us suppose the Red-Gate SQLDoc was to expose the database queries it used. If I wanted to use Red-Gate SQLDoc against Teradata then all I would need to do would be to write the equivalent queries against the Teradata DBC tables, make an ODBC connection et voila. Red-Gate has just gained another DB platform as a market for SQLDoc.

  • Of course, you could always use EF and LINQ to code once and "level the playing field" for the various RDBMS platforms.

    :rolleyes:

    "Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Instead, seek what they sought." - Matsuo Basho

  • This was one of the first things I learned when I started working with software developers like 9 years ago. It was emphasized even more because we were making video games on PC's that were pushed out to thousands of players around the world. It was re-emphasized even more when you're supporting multiple languages in multiple countries in multiple retails versions from Target to Gamestop that had to scale across dozens of PC configurations.

    Oh, the nightmares.

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