Re: Thoughts on "Love Your Database"

On Tue, May 03, 2016 at 11:11:06PM -0500, Guyren Howe wrote:
> I've long been frustrated with how most web developers I meet have no idea how to use an SQL database properly. I think I'm going to write a book called Love Your Database, aimed at web developers, that explains how to make their apps better by leveraging the power of SQL in general, and Postgres in particular.
>

For whatever it's worth, more than 10 years ago I reviewed (for a
publisher) a book along these lines. To my knowledge, it never got
published, though I thought it was quite good.

The problem is that most development on the web does not, as far as I
can tell, regard the development as what I'd think of as a real
database-backed system. An awful lot of web systems, in particular,
treat the database as a fancy and expensive but somewhat portable
filesystem. (This is even more true now that SQL isn't as ubiquitous
as it once was.)

I still think this is worth promoting, but it seems to me that
attempting to create some sort of buzz around these ideas at various
developer community events. But there are three things that I think
would help make this work for more developers:

1. This will make your application faster. (This needs to be
proved -- I agree with the "benchmarks" point in the original
post.)

2. This will make your time to ship/continuous integration/time
to fix bugs shorter. This is harder to prove, but it's an
important value for most developers (and developer managers).

3. This is way cooler than $x.

(3) is a distant 3d, but my experience of managing less-experienced
developers who go to conferences suggest that it's a good way to get
people interested.

I think there's something that we're going to have to accept, however,
and that's that there are way more application coders than there are
people who really get database systems. Fixing this problem requires
years of efforts.

Best regards,

A

--
Andrew Sullivan
ajs(at)crankycanuck(dot)ca