[thelist] MS-SQL vs. MySQL - was Front-end for MS-SQL?

rudy r937 at interlog.com
Fri May 25 13:21:03 CDT 2001


> ...  but then you're talking a lot more work.
> Which can often better be spent working on the code,
> not the database.

hey, them's fightin words

every five minutes spent designing a better database
saves you five hours of pointless coding

how's that?   <grin />


i agree with your comments about oracle (and other "industrial strength"
database systems like sql/server and sybase) requiring time and attention
to set up properly, but that's what the database administrator is supposed
to do for you


<tip>
if the database has already been built, and/or for some reason you can't
change the design, ask the database administrator to declare a custom view
if, in every page where you extract data from a particular table, you have
to stop and reformat the data yourself in the script (cold fusion, php,
asp, what have you)... the reformatting goes into the view definition only
once --

  create view FriendlyTable
     (ID, FullName, PhoneNo, BirthDate)
     as
       select ID
            , trim(both,LastName) ||
                case when trim(both,FirstName)=''
                    then "" else ', ' || trim(both,FirstName) end
            , '(' || AreaCode || ') ' || Exchange || '-' || Phone
            , substring(cast(BirthDay as varchar(20)) from 1 to 10)
        from RawTable

then all your script's queries can simply select the view's columns,
which will have the format you want "built in" as it were --

  select FullName, BirthDate
    from FriendlyTable
     order by BirthDate asc

</tip>


rudy







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