I’ve been using some form of a database throughout the entirety of my career. Sometimes single-file databases, sometimes full servers. Sometimes testing them, sometimes designing them, but a lot of times I was optimizing them. Even when learning programming with my dad, most of the apps I built were about storing and managing some type of data.

With all those years of experience, I definitely understand enough to know that I’m by no means an expert at any of it. There are several (an understatement) mechanisms by which folks make the best use of their database servers, almost all of them are tradeoffs in memory usage, space, look-up times, results retrieval, backup mechanisms, etc.

As expected, each database mechanism has their own quirks and optimizations, but the common theme is the language which you use to retrieve information: Structured Query Language (SQL). Different database engines implement different extensions to this language, some of which add powerful functionality, some of which just add confusion. But in general, SQL has been very successful in standardization across the industry.

This next chapter in the Practicality Beats Purity series covers the tradeoffs when using direct SQL queries to a database vs programming language abstractions that do it for you, like ORMs.

Read on ...