Funding Cyrus High Availability

[David Lang]

On Fri, 17 Sep 2004 szii at sziisoft.com wrote:

>> From: David Lang [mailto:david.lang at digitalinsight.com]
>
>> Mike, one of the problems with this is that different databases have
>> different interfaces and capabilities.
>>
>> if you design it to work on Oracle then if you try to make it work on
>> MySQL there are going to be quite a few things you need to change.
> --snip
>> another issue in all this is the maintainance of the resulting code. If
>> this code can be used in many different situations then more people will
>> use it (probably including CMU) and it will be maintained as a
>> side effect
>> of any other changes. however if it's tailored towards a very narrow
>> situation then only the people who have that particular problem will use
>> it and it's likly to have issues with new changes.
>
> I'd actually figured something like ODBC would be used, with prepared
> statements.  /shrug.  Abstract the whole interface issue.

unfortunantly there are a few problems with this

to start with ODBC is not readily available on all platforms.

secondly ODBC can't cover up the fact that different database engines have 
vastly differeing capabilities. if you don't use any of these capabilities 
then you don't run into this pitfall, but if you want to you will.

I really wish that ODBC did live up to it's hype, but in practice only the 
most trivial database users can transparently switch from database to 
database by changing the ODBC config

David Lang

-- 
There are two ways of constructing a software design. One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies. And the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies.
  -- C.A.R. Hoare
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