Proposal: Encouraging DB-using applications

[Guillaume Laurent]

On Sunday 21 September 2003 20:48, Roberto Alsina wrote:
>
> What item trackbacks to what other? What items come from the same source,
> or the same day. You can "display latest items" or "items for that day",
> or many other combinations. Really, I think I have about 35 different SQL
> queries, none terribly hard, but I have no idea how to do them using a
> flat file.

So you need something a bit more complex than a flat file. But I really doubt 
you need something like SQL.

> The KRecipers author mentioned that often people have thousands of
> recipes. He was complaining that a relational DB was too slow,
> imagine a flat file :-)

Several flat files if you want. Come on, I can find | xargs grep through the 
150KLOCs of Rosegarden in seconds. And recipes are fairly short bits of 
texts, you could probably even load the whole bunch in memory if you really 
have to.

> SQlite is pretty reliable. Besides, saving a daily dump is trivial.

No, saving a daily dump is *not* trivial. This is exactly the kind of thing 
which we too often regard as "trivial" but generate most of the problems. A 
typical user will not know how to do that and will not want to learn. The 
program will have to do it transparently for him, reliably, which means 
things like checking the dumps are ok and you can load them back if you need 
to. There are weeks of coding and testing behind this "trivial" thing.

> In some cases, it will. But sure, there are cases when a DB is not
> necessary. I can tell you, trying to write a serious RSS aggregator
> without one is much more difficult.

Then use sqlite if you really have to, but in things like knotes or krecipes, 
it's over-engineering.

> They are probably DB managers, or somesuch? We are talking embedded
> DBs, it's not the same thing.

OK, I'm willing to admit these are easier to handle than postgres & friends, 
but I don't think it's worth adding in kdelibs.

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