[development] Referential integrity -- finally?

[Earnest Berry III]

I fine some disagreement in the "DB Expert" comments. I think using more 
DB's will attract more "use", not "DB Experts". In most shops, in which 
they are large enough to have a sole, full-time DBA, and perhaps even a 
DBO...the decision to make a CMS or new application is a "group" effort. 
Thus, when we go into a meeting for a new application, it's a joint 
effort of everyone being presented with the problems, the DBA presenting 
the schema and sproc's (DBA's like abstraction layers too :) ), and then 
the developers providing looking at how they are going ot access and 
manipulate the data. This presents a 'groud-up'/bare-bones approach. If 
Drupal used more DB's, this would allow a lot of the frame-work to be 
used by the develper, and the DBA could still create their own 
underlying schema in which Drupal could query.

So, that in turn, I think will open up Drupal to more "shops". A true 
DB-Expert these days is far beyond Drupal (as a general 'challenge' 
anyway), and more concerned  and having "fun" with new native XML 
table-types, Geo-Spatial datatypes/tables, clustering, replication, etc.

So in summary, I think the we should look at this as opening up Drupal 
to more "shops"/"uses", rather than "DB-Experts".

Also, about the abstraction layer removing the "ugly mess" below. This 
is nice...and not so nice sometimes. I think of it like a car. I like 
that all I have to do is turn my car on, and it runs fine. I doubt any 
F1 team would like a car where all they had to do was turn the car on 
and didn't have to worry about camber, PSI, gear-selection, etc. Now, 
most schema items are trivial, and the detailed mess is fine as 
abstracted...but there are going to be times where people want the mess. 
Bring me the mess..sometimes :). I know in my last project I was saved 
my MS-SQL offering "locking hints" where I could tell the DB what type 
of lock I wanted it to acquire in my query. Locking is usually 
abstracted in MySQL (offering only table lock and row locking, and 
mostly done automatically for you by the RDMS).

Michael Favia wrote:
> Derek Wright wrote:
>   
>> i don't think the DB experts are just floating around out there, waiting
>> for The Right CMS(tm) to show up that does everything they ever wanted
>> with all their DB ideas so they can finally get their hands dirty doing
>> interesting work.  they're going to come to Drupal for all sorts of
>> random reasons, and may or may not put their DB expertise to use making
>> Drupal better...
>>     
>
> Agreed. With my only concern being that a DB expert will first look at
> the state of our storage mechanisms as his primary judgment of the
> overall quality of the system (because it is what he knows) and might
> unfairly deduce that the other fields of CS arent taken seriously
> either. Assuming such an assumption is valid concerning DB management
> with regards to RI and schema abstraction, etc. This isnt something I
> agree with but it is just a point worth considering IMO. Demonstrating
> our willingness and /attempt/ to do things /right/ by them opens a lot
> of doors to individuals who might be wiling to improve it.
>
> To bring this back to your experience: You saw a good project trying to
> do things right (CVS + contribs) but needing help getting it done
> properly so you opted to help. Olive branches are powerful things.
>