Proposal: Encouraging DB-using applications

[Guillaume Laurent]

On Sunday 21 September 2003 10:11, Roberto Alsina wrote:
>
> Examples of applications where a DB makes sense:
>
> Recipe app (KRecipes)
> Mail/News client (why not?, it makes "search folders" way simpler)
> CD/Book/Whatever catalog
> Notetaking applications (KJots, KNotes)
> RSS aggregator (try handling 300 feeds in a flat file :-)

And here we disagree. None of these apps would benefit from using a DB, and 
all are the perfect example of using a tool way too powerful and complex for 
the job. Email has the additional requirement that it *must* be in a format 
easy to recover.

> Yes, all of these can be implememnted by grepping a few text files.
> But
>
> a) That doesn't scale

It scales more than enough for the amount of data a typical user will ever 
have to handle.

> b) That's ugly ;-)

Who cares, we need something which works, is easy to maintain and reliable.

> c) That's actually harder!

Come on. It can become harder if you actually have fairly complex queries to 
do. In most cases, it won't.

> Please ask your VB-programming friends if having a semi-decent DB
> available doesn't help writing apps.

I don't have any VB-programming friends. I do have friends using DBs, and they 
would all tell you exactly the same thing : DBs don't apply in these cases.

Note that by "DB" I mean a relational DB. Even if you make something like 
MySQL or Postgres lighter, it will still be overkill in most cases. I suppose 
BerkeleyDB is acceptable, although in terms of reliability it doesn't seem to 
have a very good track record.

-- 
						Guillaume.
						http://www.telegraph-road.org