[Seaside] my fear of database design and Seaside

[James Foster]

Chris,

While Avi and James have adequately covered the serious responses, I  
couldn't help but chuckle about your assumption that database  
designers have thought a lot about the design of the typical  
application's database. I'm sure that such people exist and that they  
could do this work--I've just never seen it happen on a real project.  
Mostly the developers add features (based on customer demands) until  
it gets too complex to manage. If that is what is going to happen, you  
will get a lot further if you can avoid (OODBMS) or simplify (GLORP))  
one level of complexity (O/R mapping).

James

On May 16, 2008, at 2:27 AM, Chris Dawson 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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