[Seaside] my fear of database design and Seaside

[Chris Dawson]

Hi all,

I'm plugging away and enjoying learning about Seaside.  From my limited
reading so far I gather that there are massive benefits to using something
like Magma or GemStone/S over traditional ORM into RDBMSs.  If I understand
from attending Randal Schwartz's great talk at BarCamp here in Portland a
few weeks back that Seaside can take complicated object structures and just
stick them into a object database as-is without the overhead of mapping that
structure into SQL, and that this is powerful and fast.  My concern as I
design my application is, however, that I despite knowing the basics of
database design and simple normalization that I will do something stupid and
create structures that are not scalable or searchable.  When I use a
traditional database I assume that the database designers have thought of a
lot of the details of implementation and are forcing me into making choices
about how to store the data so that it is at least moderately searchable.
I'm not saying that most of the people on this list could not build the
right structures as Smalltalk objects.  I'm saying I question my own ability
to do so, and Seaside seems to enable me to do this, which might be a great
joy for you all, but which might be for the worst in my case.  If this is
true, perhaps I should use GLORP over Postgres, yet I worry I will lose some
of the magic pixie dust that made Seaside seem so different.  Or, should I
not worry about this, as it will always be faster and more scalable to drop
in a cluster of GemStones and do a dictionary lookup in my code than it will
be to do a join in a MySQL database?

I do love learning about Seaside, it is stretching my brain is such nice
ways.  Thanks in advance for your comments.

Chris
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/seaside/attachments/20080515/9893c3c8/attachment.htm