[Grok-dev] Re: STORM howto

[Martijn Faassen]

Fernando Correa Neto wrote:
[snip]
> Indeed. But I'd say that in at least for me, 80% of the projects I've
> worked with SQL, the database scripts were generated by DBA's by tools
> that were made for that purpose and were present in the industry for
> years. IOW, very specialized tools.
> And at the end of the day, we developers, would be *only* responsible
> for plugging the webapp into *their* model.

That's not, I think, how many web applications are built. You can't just 
discount the success of, say, Ruby on Rails, like this. Or PHP, 
actually. In both cases, I think the developer *often* creates the 
relational database schema, and a significant contributor to the success 
of RoR is that you get going with a relational database by yourself, in 
your Ruby code, without having to worry about what a non-existent DBA is 
doing. I think that in many RoR projects, or, say, PHP projects, the 
developer really also develops the database as they go along.

In many projects the DBA is the web application developer. There is no 
separation. As a small data point too, I've done a quite bunch of 
projects with a RDB involved over time, and only in one or two was it 
that the database was really maintained elsewhere. I

 > So yes, sometimes you have different scenarios that you'd want to
 > create complex database models and sometimes you don't. You just want
 > to create the not so complex model that you can maintain on your
 > python code.

I understand that it's important a tool can deal with an existing, 
externally maintained database. It's an important use case, and in ideal 
circumstances this can lead to a better application and a better 
database overall. It's also important, I think, that a tool can deal 
with a web application (including storage layer) developed from scratch. 
Of course you can have your developer write those create table 
statements (and schema evolution logic) outside your application; this 
has worked for PHP for a long time. But there's neat stuff you can do 
with schema generation from Python code, too.

> IMHO, ORM's try to make it simple by turning very complex joins for
> instance into simple, and readable, python statements and thus making
> the webapp developer's life easier on that end and most of them, can
> do that :).

Yes, so we're not worrying too much about that feature in Storm or 
SQLAlchemy. I am worried about the consequences of not having the schema 
generation feature with Storm.

Regards,

Martijn