Databases suck

[bwh]

So far this week I have spent too much time at work and not enough with tea_cantata. We have been preparing for a software evaluation - something like a demo, but where the customer can get hands-on with the software - today. The software in question is a completely new version of our most popular product on top of a completely new version of our application server, the latter of which I've been working on for the past year. Suffice to say that neither is feature-complete or stable and the past few weeks (for one of which I was away, thankfully) have involved added the most important of the missing features and fixing the most egregious bugs. This triage culminated in all-night testing and hacking last night, though I was able to duck out at 3:30.

Along the way, my hatred for database vendors with offices in Reading and whose names begin with M and O have only grown. The database layer I wrote some time ago but which only got severely tested recently is now littered with workarounds for the foibles and outright bugs in their software.

Comments

[womble2.livejournal.com]

We don't have a persistence layer as such. The new application mostly stores information in XML files, for with we have a proprietary API that works well with our scripting language. This is why it wasn't until recently that anyone really fully exercised the database code, which is needed for integration with other software. (Also the initial customer - or rather potential customer - wants to use Oracle 8 through ODBC, which is not a combination I had tried.)