[development] Data-driven database tables and updates

[Khalid B]

On 6/10/06, Adrian Simmons <adrinux at perlucida.com> wrote:
> 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?

That was my objection in the email thread on abstraction.

Abstracting table creation is nice, and has value.

What I am against is that there is no real 100% abstraction beyond table
creation. At best it will be lowest common denominator, and performance
cannot be achieved without tweaking to the specific database.