[development] Data-driven database tables and updates

[Adrian Simmons]

Dries Buytaert wrote:
> It is my opinion that creating a Drupal-specific 
> abstraction layer on top of an existing, standards compliant abstraction 
> layer
Standards compliant? Ah right, so we don't actually need a drupal specific 
abstraction layer, because MySQL and pgSQL both understand SQL, and thus we 
only need one piece of SQL code to create or update each db or table, and in 
fact Oracle or any other SQL db out there...

But back here in the real world each db has it's own modifications and 
idiosyncrasies, SQL may be a standard, but the databases that use it aren't 
standards compliant. Or have I misunderstood?

> I, for one, wouldn't want to learn an application specific SQL-like 
> description language
I think you've overblown that just a little. Adrian has specifically said he 
wants to make a few operations easier when updating and installing drupal 
and it's modules, not create an entire SQL-like language. And he wants to do 
it so developers can support more than one db without having to learn 2 or 5 
different variants of SQL.

More to the point - if I'm remembering the previous version of this thread 
properly - a small abstraction system wouldn't even stop people using SQL 
directly if they prefered.

-- 
Adrian Simmons (aka adrinux) <http://adrinux.perlucida.com>
e-mail <mailto:adrinux at perlucida.com>