::scr Data integrity and why databases suck

[Simon Kinahan]

> For a completely new system, however, it seems a crazy approach to take.
> You'd be better serialising the damned objects and putting them in a
> filesystem!

Well, maybe. The DB does give you something: transactionality. Thats about
the only value I can see. As it happens, I also think those complicated
set-based operations are quite valuable. Having been an ML person it the
past, I find it much more appealing to write SELECT ... WHERE (something
complicated) than while(blah) { if (something complicated) .... }.

The current architecture seems to give the worst of both worlds: you have to
do iteration by hand, you have to worry about database nastiness, and you
have to fiddle around with the mapping between the two.

I'd go for OO databases myself, but they don't seem very good at queries.
Some kind of intermediate thing, maybe.

Simon