[Seaside] my fear of database design and Seaside

[Avi Bryant]

Hi Chris,
My advice is to not worry about it for now.  You will, no doubt, eventually
hit bottlenecks in your code because of the way you have set up your data
structures, but I predict that
a) you will get surprisingly far before this happens (linear scans of
in-memory data scale better than you think), and
b) when you do, it won't be a huge deal to add the indexing you need to make
it fast.

One thing you might want to consider in your design which will make life
easier for you later, is having some kind of notification to a central
manager object that a given piece of data has changed.  Even if you don't do
anything with it yet, it will eventually probably be useful to know when you
have to update indices, invalidate caches, and so on.

Avi


On Thu, May 15, 2008 at 5:27 PM, Chris Dawson <xrdawson at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
>
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