Enterprise Rails

Sit Atop the Shoulders of Giants

The field of database technology is large, mature, and there is ongoing academic research on storing, searching, and making sense of data stored in a database. The commercial Oracle database was first introduced in 1979. The first version of PostgreSQL, the best choice at the time of this writing for an open source RDBMS, appeared in 1989. An unparalleled amount of research and development has gone into these products, and best-of-breed choices in this area have not changed every few years they way they have for web scripting languages and frameworks.

If you treat the database simply as a place to dump your application’s data for later retrieval, you are shortchanging yourself and your application. When used correctly, not only will your database safeguard your data from the effects of errant code, but it will also afford you aggregation, computation, and retrieval speed that you could never hope to reproduce with even the cleanest or most elegant application code.

It behooves a web application developer to learn not only the ins and outs of the web framework but also the RDBMS atop which that framework sits. Remember that your database, which contains your company’s most precious asset—its data—is very likely to outlive the application you write on top of it.

Choosing the Right RDBMS

All examples in this book assume the use of PostgreSQL. For those using Oracle or another database that adheres closely to the SQL standard, the concepts are identical, ...