From: goran@krampe.se Reply-To: The general-purpose Squeak developers listsqueak-dev@lists.squeakfoundation.org To: The general-purpose Squeak developers listsqueak-dev@lists.squeakfoundation.org Subject: Re: Design Principles Behind Smalltalk, Revisited Date: Tue, 2 Jan 2007 10:56:23 +0200
I don't have time right now posting in this thread, let me just mention that I disagree with JJ :) regarding the arguments for using an RDB instead of an ODB. There are of course arguments in both directions - depending on context - but IMHO the lifecycle-argument is not as clear cut as described.
Well, let me clarify my position a little. I don't feel that ODB's are useless or anything. Things you see in the Rails demo's should probably have been in an ODB (or even just objects, as Ramon's "blog in 15 minutes" showed). I simply believe in the right tool for the right job, and you can't beat an RDB in it's domain.
It depends on what you are doing. Sometimes in a powerful language like smalltalk you just keep your data in objects and let image persistence handle it. Sometimes you want a little more so you write the data out to files. Sometimes you want to go even further, and this is when an ODB can be a great solution.
But at the enterprise level (i.e. lots of different programs over a large organization) I still see RDBMS as the winner. And the reason I see it this way is simply: SQL/RDB can be seen as a DSL system for dealing with set data. There is a tremendous amount of power built into it for this particular domain that would be difficult to make more concise in another way. I suppose it is just a question of how comfortable one is with SQL.
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