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[Steven Champeon <schampeo AT hesketh.com>]

on Wed, Oct 15, 2003 at 01:14:16PM -0400, Shea Tisdale wrote:
> Personally, I'm enjoying the sql lesson here.  And I'm glad that people
> who do this for a living, i.e. Michael, Diana and Steve (Steve, you do
> have mySQL dba down on your resume don't you?) are posting such
> informative stuff about this topic.

I don't have a resume anymore :) But yeah, I've been working, on and off
(like most things I do) with mSQL and MySQL, some postgresql, and other
databases since 1995 or so. I don't claim to the level of expertise that
some others here do, but I have built several db-driven applications
over the years, and have found most of the basic apps don't need much
more than the fancy fast filesystem access that MySQL affords, and very
few need much complex data manipulation to speak of.

That's why I posted the (apparently controversial :) guitar example. I
can probably play MySQL better than I can play guitar, but once the
basics were down, I find I can do most anything I've needed to without
much struggle.

The real leap forward for a lot of folks is learning how to build the db
and then build PHP/Perl objects that you can populate with queries or
use as basis for inserts/updates. A lot of the PHP code I've seen (and
some of the early stuff I wrote, for that matter) would benefit from a
sane approach to db design /first/ and then a sane approach to object
design second. But that often takes either having to go back and maintain
the awful code you wrote as a novice, or maintaining/extending someone
else's awful code before they realize the power of using objects, or the
pain that can be caused by poor table/query design.

S

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