Dries Buytaert wrote:
On 12 May 2006, at 17:50, Gerhard Killesreiter wrote:
Hundreds of books have been written about PHP and MySQL. As a newbie, you can buy these books and understand what Drupal's MySQL schemas mean.
While that is true, most people don't buy these books. I think that Adrian's proposed scheme isn't harder to learn from scratch than the usual SQL queries. The only drawback is that when you learn plain SQL you can use it elsewhere too while you can't do so with Adrian's abstraction layer.
No. If no one would buy these books, there wouldn't be as many available.
Well, I admit you got a point there. I always wondered who buys all these computer books and how many of the books just end up sitting in shelves and try to impress the casual visitor. :p Do you own a book on PHP? If yes, did you buy it yourself? If yes, why? The closest to buying a computer book I ever got was to print the AWK manual and to bind it. And no, I am not writing this because I am trying to impress anybody.
I'm not saying that the database definition function is a bad thing or that we should drop it on the floor. We have to carefully evaluate whether the advantages (portability) outweight the drawbacks (less developers).
Any developer worth the name should be easily able to understand this scheme if he has prior knowledge of SQL. If he hasn't then it doesn't matter (to us) if he learns plain SQL or our db abstraction layer.
No. If you believe that is true, then the following holds as well: "Any developer worth the name should be easily able to understand PostgreSQL if he has prior knowledge of (My)SQL".
Yes, of course, the differences aren't that big. I only always ask the people who I know actually use PostgreSQL because I am too lazy to look it up, and they don't need to. I have no interest in PostgreSQL, so I don't learn it. But I am confident I could if I wanted to. Cheers, Gerhard