Comments on: Platforms Come With a Culture http://hackerboss.com/platforms-come-with-a-culture/ Developing software and managing development teams. Mon, 07 May 2012 11:50:39 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v= hourly 1 By: Ville Laurikarihttp://hackerboss.com/platforms-come-with-a-culture/comment-page-1/#comment-394 Ville Laurikari Fri, 09 Oct 2009 17:45:39 +0000 http://hackerboss.com/?p=1159#comment-394 It's of course quite possible to craft your application so that it works with, say, all of MySQL, SQL Server, and DB2. It depends on the situation if it's going to be worth it or not. My personal experiences are mostly with MySQL, Oracle, and Sybase. Getting the same code to work with Oracle and Sybase was a bit painful. Oracle cannot distinguish between empty strings and NULLs, for example. Oracle behavior with respect to locking (and hence deadlocks) is different from most other databases. No problems on Sybase, lots of deadlocks on Oracle. Also, things like integer type precisions are different in different databases so you need to watch out for that. The list could continue quite a bit.Like writing portable C code, it's <em>possible</em> to write your code so that it works with multiple databases. But it's still a far cry from "our app will works with any standard SQL database" and "we'll use ODBC, so we can switch the database for free" which seem to be a popular myths propagated by people who haven't actually done portable SQL. It’s of course quite possible to craft your application so that it works with, say, all of MySQL, SQL Server, and DB2. It depends on the situation if it’s going to be worth it or not.

My personal experiences are mostly with MySQL, Oracle, and Sybase. Getting the same code to work with Oracle and Sybase was a bit painful. Oracle cannot distinguish between empty strings and NULLs, for example. Oracle behavior with respect to locking (and hence deadlocks) is different from most other databases. No problems on Sybase, lots of deadlocks on Oracle. Also, things like integer type precisions are different in different databases so you need to watch out for that. The list could continue quite a bit.

Like writing portable C code, it’s possible to write your code so that it works with multiple databases. But it’s still a far cry from “our app will works with any standard SQL database” and “we’ll use ODBC, so we can switch the database for free” which seem to be a popular myths propagated by people who haven’t actually done portable SQL.

]]> By: lonelycoderhttp://hackerboss.com/platforms-come-with-a-culture/comment-page-1/#comment-392 lonelycoder Thu, 08 Oct 2009 14:31:34 +0000 http://hackerboss.com/?p=1159#comment-392 So you're saying that SQL is not portable, but there are a lot of applications which support multiple SQL databases. Do you have any examples on where there are actual problems? So you’re saying that SQL is not portable, but there are a lot of applications which support multiple SQL databases. Do you have any examples on where there are actual problems?

]]> By: hackerbosshttp://hackerboss.com/platforms-come-with-a-culture/comment-page-1/#comment-389 hackerboss Wed, 07 Oct 2009 10:27:41 +0000 http://hackerboss.com/?p=1159#comment-389 <p>In my blog: Platforms Come With a Culture <a href="http://bit.ly/axBo1" rel="nofollow">http://bit.ly/axBo1</a></p> <p><i>This comment was originally posted on <a href="http://twitter.com/hackerboss/statuses/4679192957" rel="nofollow">Twitter</a></i></p> In my blog: Platforms Come With a Culture http://bit.ly/axBo1

This comment was originally posted on Twitter

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