Posted in IT Pioneers, Still-coding, tagged Coding, History, IT Pioneers, PL/1, Structured design on August 5, 2023| Leave a Comment »
I learned to code in 1963. Things were different then.
There were some obvious things, like 24 hour turnarounds on tests, and storing code on paper tape. Oh – and the computer had about .000000001 of the processor speed on my watch, but at the time we thought it was pretty cool.
I am beginning to sound like one of the four yorkshiremen so I will move on. I want to talk about the pioneers of structured programming and structured design,
(more…)Posted in Database Management Systems, Still-coding, Technology, tagged json-schema, NOSQL, SQL on July 20, 2023| Leave a Comment »
A schema means different things for an SQL and a NOSQL database management system. If you are using SQL, you have to tell the system about the format of the data before you can use – that is the schema. When it comes to NOSQL databases everything is different. You don’t need a schema, you simply present data and the system stores it in whatever format you send it.
Each document in a collection1 can be a different layout and different types of data. The flexibility of NOSQL databases suggests that data design is less important. For example I read: “… since NoSQL doesn’t necessitate the need for a schema, you avoid the expense and time of that initial design stage.”
I don’t think so
(more…)Posted in Database Management Systems, Still-coding, Technology, tagged Database, express, json, node.js, NOSQL, sailsjs, schema, SQL on May 4, 2023| Leave a Comment »
A schema means different things for an SQL and a NOSQL database management system. If you are using SQL, you have to tell the system about the format of the data before you can use – that is the schema. When it comes to NOSQL databases everything is different. You don’t need a schema, you simply present data and the system stores it in whatever format you send it.
Each document in a collection1 can be a different layout and different types of data. The flexibility of NOSQL databases suggests that data design is less important. For example I read: “… since NoSQL doesn’t necessitate the need for a schema, you avoid the expense and time of that initial design stage.”
I don’t think so
(more…)Posted in Still-coding, tagged cassandra, CouchDB, Firestore, MongoDB, mysql, oraclexe, postgresql, sqlite on April 20, 2023| Leave a Comment »
When we all got locked down, I needed a project to keep my brain active. (That gets important as you get older: I just had my 80th birthday). My wife is learning Spanish and I tried writing a novel (it didn’t fly). In the end I decided to do something that I was good at – software development. I wrote a generic system to update and query a database using node.js. Test system here: http://www.sudsjs.com.
The database is accessed through a driver, which initially was written and tested for MySQL, PostgreSQL and SQLite 3. Since then, I have implemented (or tried) various NOSQL systems. So here is a summary and a link to any blog posts about all of the databases I have used.
(more…)Posted in Still-coding, Technology, tagged NOSQL on February 12, 2023| Leave a Comment »
The sales manager came down to the IT department and looked around. He spotted a young developer who looked a bit bored. His name plate said ‘Luke’. “I have a small job for you if you are interested”. Luke nodded. “We get sales orders from out customers. The warehouse handles them but we can’t get access to the data. Can you write a little program to store then on a computer for me.” Luke looked at a file of sample orders. “Sure no problem.”
He turned to the jaded old database administrator (Joda) in the corner “This is a great application for a NOSQL Document database like MongoDB or CouchDB.” Joda looked up – “That is a decision, regret you will”. Luke muttered something about ‘luddite’ and went back to his desk and coded up one NOSQL document per sales order, with customer details and an embedded array of order lines. The logical way to solve the problem.
(more…)Posted in Still-coding, Technology, tagged CouchDB, Database, NOSQL on November 10, 2022| Leave a Comment »
Posted in Still-coding, Technology, tagged Database, Firestore, NOSQL on October 11, 2022| Leave a Comment »
I decided to use my lockdown project SUDSJS.com to test out a few different NOSQL database management systems (DBMS).
SUDSJS is written in JavaScript using the node.js server-side system and I designed it so that I could plug in different drivers for different databases. I wrote database drivers for MySQL, SQLite 3 and PostgreSQL. The first NOSQL system I tried was MongoDB, and the SUDSJS.com test site is currently running using this (correction – it is now running on CouchDB). The second NOSQL system I tried was Firestore from Google.
It didn’t go well.
(more…)Posted in Still-coding, Technology, tagged Database, MongoDB, NOSQL, SQL, sudsjs on September 29, 2022| Leave a Comment »
For the last 50 years there has been one and only one way of designing a database. SQL Database management systems (DBMS) have been the uncontested standard. (A better name is ‘relational’ because SQL is just the name of the language used to access them, but we will stick with it.)
But things have changed in the last 10-15 years. Databases that disobey relational rules are coming into vogue. The term NOSQL is used for these non-relational databases (the above chart is work in progress, but I have been looking at these systems.)
What is the difference between classic databases and this new breed?
Posted in Still-coding, Technology, tagged MongoDB, NOSQL on May 17, 2022| Leave a Comment »
You know what an invoice looks like. We have all seen thousands of them – probably too many. But invoices illustrate an interesting problem – and I am not talking about your VAT return. I am talking about the new kids on the database block – document databases. An example is MongoDB. These can store all the data for one invoice in a single structured record (called a ‘document’).
(more…)Posted in Still-coding, Technology, tagged MongoDB, NOSQL, SQL on April 5, 2022| Leave a Comment »
I am getting to the end of stage one in writing a database driver for MongoDB to use in my Lockdown Project sudsjs.com. All has gone well until I get to totalling up a field in the database. I had to enter the wonderful world of aggregation, which is powerful function-rich and confusing.
(more…)
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