On 1/5/06, Cliff Wells <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > What I took away from this article is the sense that while David is a > brilliant programmer with an uncanny sense of where to ride the line on > many ideas, he's not really a database guy. In fact, I'd say he'd > probably happily agree, judging from the tone of the article. I think > his view, while interesting in a very abstract "we're not talking about > real databases with real, important data" sense has some merit. > However, I think the notion of an "application database" is a fallacy, > unless you are just talking about the database for a blog or some other > highly specific, non-enterprise type of application.
Actually, I do think that both styles (application database, integration database) have merit for certain apps. Here's where application databases make some amount of sense: 1) newfangled, "Web 2.0" applications and web services. Things like Backpack (surprise, surprise!), where the application serves a distinct purpose and lives out on the net. Data I/O is all done via web requests that go through the application code, which ensures the integrity of the data (to whatever extent it has been programmed to do so). 2) small office applications. I did a lot of work on billing systems for doctors offices. Those systems are (or, at least, were) quite self-contained and the people in the office tended to use those apps for everything and not be computer literate enough to do much outside of there beyond word processing. (That's a generalization, certainly.) Now, these two points are what you mean by "highly specific, non-enterprise type of application", but I wanted to break it out more and emphasize that there's *a lot* of this, and #1 is still a growing category. The larger the organization, the more likely it is to move into the "integration database' category. A big organization *could* decide to expose the database entirely via web services and use that layer to maintain the database, or it could opt to move more into stored procedures, triggers and the like to make the database engine do the work. So, even within big organizations, there's still a choice to be made that could enable the "application database" perspective. Kevin
