Re: Postgres vr.s MySQL- style differences?

[Lukas Kahwe Smith <smith(at)pooteeweet(dot)org>]

Jim Nasby wrote:

> > Yup, the tend to heavily rely on data integrity management on the 
> > middle tier. Which by the way is not totally crazy, because you need 
> > most of the data integrity rules on the frontend anyways, to generate 
> > proper GUI's. Actually in non object-relational RDBMS (which are the 
> > norm, PostgreSQL is special), you can never do your full integrity 
> > management inside the database.
>
> Can you give an example of that, because I can't think of one, unless 
> you're talking about integrity that has to lie outside the database (ie: 
> if you're storing filesystem locations in the database).

Yes, but more trivially since like "is this a valid email address" (note 
I said this is not the case with object-relational databases like 
PostgreSQL). Checking for the format of an email address is just 
something I would want to do with a check constraint (especially if I 
have to replicate that check constraint in every relevant column).

> Perhaps if you carefully hand-code your middleware... my experience is 
> that things like Hibernate tend to destroy performance because unless 
> you really, really know it well you end up with some pretty bad database 
> access methods. It doesn't have to be that way, but it often is.

Yeah, I think at the very least ORM's make it less obvious when you are 
calling something expensive. It all happens sort of magical and you do 
not really know when something is going to cost you and if so how much.

regards,
Lukas