Holding out a bank that is using an app written aeons ago in pre-RDBMS days is hardly a good argument for the ability to not use them. While you *can* trust your app to do the right thing, it's far from a best practice. The company in that example just did not have a choice at the time.
"It's an assumption hack because it was assumed that programmers could not be trusted to do it in their applications"
No, it's a rational and sound decision to put important business logic as close to the data as possible, and to make it nigh impossible to do bad things, whether on purpose or accidentally. I wouldn't consider for a moment NOT using a transactional database for my data, no matter how "better than average" my programmers are. The history of computing is littered with the plaintive cries of "We really did think we could do it all in the app..."
One more nitpick: "But, in their entire history, they've never lost a penny, or an account" And they would admit it if they did? :)
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fallenpegasus's journal
Not a convinving argument
Date: 2009-04-15 01:55 pm (UTC)"It's an assumption hack because it was assumed that programmers could not be trusted to do it in their applications"
No, it's a rational and sound decision to put important business logic as close to the data as possible, and to make it nigh impossible to do bad things, whether on purpose or accidentally. I wouldn't consider for a moment NOT using a transactional database for my data, no matter how "better than average" my programmers are. The history of computing is littered with the plaintive cries of "We really did think we could do it all in the app..."
One more nitpick:
"But, in their entire history, they've never lost a penny, or an account"
And they would admit it if they did? :)