Web development technology

Hi

folks, looking for your opinions on this.

In terms of databases as the backend of a website, are there are any pros or cons to using Oracle over MySQL? i.e. technology dis/advantages, hosting dis/advantages etc...

Have any of you used RubyonRails? it seems to be the latest approach to web development but interested to know what you think.

Cheers.

democrates

Re DB it depends on what you need to do, how much you have to spend, what existing skills are available and what project timescale you have.

Oracle as a backend for web apps is rare compared with mysql, I don't even recall seeing any off the shelf hosting package using Oracle which is common in heavyweight corporate environments, eg oil and gas utilities etc. Flickr among others use mysql and various techniques enabled scale.

Frankly I think major RDBMS vendors have gone way ott in adding "value added" features. In trying to lock developers into licence fees they've peddled the idea of an 'Oracle application' for example. They've expanded the footprint of the data store into the code space, they cooked up object-relational which is an affront to the mathematics underpinning the relational database and if that weren't bad enough witness the specatacle of xml documents dumped into blobs.

Part of the blame for the latter problem lies with W3C and their document view of the it world in fairness, and on the upside the standardisation work around rdf etc can eventually feed back to the relational model so in time the hierarchical joke will be history and we'll have decent relational data interchange technologies.

Anyway to avoid db lock-in the relational model and a data abstraction layer works fine, with cacheing etc. as metrics and temporal integrity dictate (eg Flickr can get away with 'eventual integrity' in their clustering, not a runner for realtime systems).

Haven't used ruby let alone rails so I can't talk to that but I've had no problems using php.

grahamor

Hi wrote: »

Have any of you used RubyonRails? it seems to be the latest approach to web development but interested to know what you think.

Cheers.

Give Django a try too, it's really cool and automates alot of things.

CuLT

democrates wrote: »

...

Do you have a newsletter I can subscribe to?

democrates

CuLT wrote: »

Do you have a newsletter I can subscribe to?

Ah tanks cult!
I suppose it would have to be printed on bog roll, there's an idea, "blog roll"...

Epic Tissue

http://www.mysql.com/news-and-events/web-seminars/display-310.html

jmcc

Hi wrote: »

folks, looking for your opinions on this.

In terms of databases as the backend of a website, are there are any pros or cons to using Oracle over MySQL? i.e. technology dis/advantages, hosting dis/advantages etc...

Oracle is overkill for most web applications. The difference between web/academic exercise databases and large databases is immense. On the web, MySQL seems to be the standard and it handles the tiny databases (10MB or so of data) easily. MySQL also has the benefit of running on almost any kind of junk PC. Oracle is quite different. It is aimed at those who use large databases (upwards of 50GB of data) and have large bank balances. It also tends to require a higher spec machine as the database server. Oracle also has its own programming language and is somewhat more complex than MySQL eventhough MySQL has stored procedures and other features.

it seems to be the latest approach to web development but interested to know what you think.

The difference between professional db backed websites programmers and amateur db backed website programmers is that the professionals rely on having a working solution that will keep working. One of the biggest problems in web databases is, perhaps, the limitations with which academia infects students. Thus you have all sorts of mumbo-jumbo passed off as valuable information (Basic,Pascal, Java etc ). And after a student has been indoctrinated into some toy language, every problem will look like it is crying out to be solved with that toy language.

The trick is to strip away the rubbish and find the programs that will work and will work reliably for the particular application. For a lot of applications, MySQL is fine. (I run one of the biggest web databases in Ireland using MySQL) For some Oracle or Postgres is required. You have got to use the right tools for the job rather than hoping that as you have one hammer everything is a nail. You should always try new things - but on a development box and never the production box.

Regards...jmcc

CuLT

democrates wrote: »

Ah tanks cult!
I suppose it would have to be printed on bog roll, there's an idea, "blog roll"...

Blog would do just nicely

randombar

democrates wrote: »

Re DB it depends on what you need to do, how much you have to spend, what existing skills are available and what project timescale you have.

Oracle as a backend for web apps is rare compared with mysql, I don't even recall seeing any off the shelf hosting package using Oracle which is common in heavyweight corporate environments, eg oil and gas utilities etc. Flickr among others use mysql and various techniques enabled scale.

Frankly I think major RDBMS vendors have gone way ott in adding "value added" features. In trying to lock developers into licence fees they've peddled the idea of an 'Oracle application' for example. They've expanded the footprint of the data store into the code space, they cooked up object-relational which is an affront to the mathematics underpinning the relational database and if that weren't bad enough witness the specatacle of xml documents dumped into blobs.

Part of the blame for the latter problem lies with W3C and their document view of the it world in fairness, and on the upside the standardisation work around rdf etc can eventually feed back to the relational model so in time the hierarchical joke will be history and we'll have decent relational data interchange technologies.

Anyway to avoid db lock-in the relational model and a data abstraction layer works fine, with cacheing etc. as metrics and temporal integrity dictate (eg Flickr can get away with 'eventual integrity' in their clustering, not a runner for realtime systems).

Haven't used ruby let alone rails so I can't talk to that but I've had no problems using php.

That made my head sore

Interesting stuff though!!!