FreeTDS Development Group

["James K. Lowden" <jklowden AT speakeasy.org>]

Geoff Winkless wrote:

> A well written middle tier should be reasonably portable. A middle tier that
> relies on implementation-specific SQL will (of course) present the same
> problems.

I don't really have any argument with that, Geoff, just a semantic point.

Your definition of "well written" is "reasonably portable".  That's valid, 
but it's
not universal.  Every implementation of anything on any platform in any 
language
faces a trade-off between portability and the exploitation of the features of 
a
particular environment.  Those features might be ease of development, 
performance,
specialized libraries, whatever.

A middle tier -- as a member of the set of everything -- faces that same 
trade-off.
I think it's perfectly valid to say that the purpose of some hypothetical 
middle tier
is to minimize the bandwidth to and/or load on the database server.  That 
would
entail exploiting every Sybase trick in the book, and it wouldn't be "well 
written"
until its objective was maximized.

All to say:  In gauging good fast and cheap, you have to define good.  
Nothing more.

Regards,

--jkl