Re: Triggers, Stored Procedures, PHP. was: Re: PostgreSQL Advocacy, Thoughts and Comments

On 29/11/2003 13:41 Chris Travers wrote:
> [snip]
> It is all how you organize your app. Stored proceedures are extremely
> useful when they represent a unified API for accessing parts of the
> database. Word of advice: Keep the database self-contained. If all you
> want is object persistance, then why non use Berkeley Database? It is
> even
> transactional. The point of having an RDBMS is to provide more
> flexibility
> than a simple persistance store. When used sensibly, stored proceedures
> are
> extremely simplifying, not the other way arround.

Actually I've worked on projects where views and stored procedures have
been used to present a logical view of the underlying data and help to
isolate the application from database changes. I think this is an entirely
reasonable thing to do. Berkely DB me? Never! PostgreSQL rules! :)

> [snip] I don't think Jason was compensating for weaknesses in the
> language-- I
> think that he was asking why he woudln't want to build into the database
> the
> universal functions accessed by multiple applications. And he would be
> right in trying to do so.
>
> Let me give you an example: One of the large projects I maintain is
> HERMES
> (http://hermes.sourceforge.net). Hermes relies on its own user and
> permissions catalogs in order to provide a consistant administrative
> interface across database managers and simplify the task of assigning
> permissions to users and groups. The differences in syntax can them be
> handled in wrapper layers, etc.
>
> However, it makes sense to try to wrap these catalogs using stored
> proceedures so that third-party apps don't necessarily need to be aware
> of
> the structure of the catalogs when assigning permissions. This way, too,
> the db users' catalog and the user catalog in the RDBMS can be guaranteed
> to
> be in sync. It will also allow me eventually to directly enforce
> permissions using triggers rather than rely on the RDBMS model (useful in
> shared hosting environments).
>
> >
> > > Java has its own issues and I am not sure it is as far supiour as you
> > > are claming it is. But that is not for this dscussion.
> >
> > I'm not aware of any "issues" with Java (unless you mean Swing ;)).
>
> Every language has "issues." This is not the time or place for a
> development environemnt holy war ;-) But--- PHP and Python all the way
> ;-)

Python? Hm. Is this the 5 minute argument or the full half hour? :-)

>
> >
> > Much of the populatity of MySQL seems to stem from PHPs out-of-the-box
> > support for it. With the MySQL client library license change, this
> > situation will probably change. There was a long thread about this
> earlier
> > this year. Check the archives.
> >
> Putting the cart before the horse. MySQL is far easier to administer in
> a
> shared hosting environment. Maybe one of these days, I will put together
> a
> package for managing PostgreSQL accounts in this way. If there is
> interest,
> please email me off-list and we can get started. I don't expect MySQL's
> dominance to change until we can offer an easy-to-administer alternative
> for
> these environments.

Why not contribute to one of the existing PG admin utilities such as
pgAdmin III or phpPgAdmin?

--
Paul Thomas
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