lawgon

My fault really - have this bad habit of believing everything i am told and trusting everyone. It was around 1996 when i needed a db backend for an application. The only thing available was mysql - postgres was broken at the time. I didnt know sql - wasnt even aware that there was such a language. Anyway started using mysql and reading the manual. A good part of the manual spent time explaining why things like foreign keys, views, transactions, subqueries and triggers are a bad idea. Only a clueless moron would want a rdbms to have such useless features which can easily be handled in the scripting language itself. I believed it and wasted 4 years writing huge amounts of extra code to do by myself what the rdbms is supposed to do. I then discovered postgres - it had been fixed and had all the above useless thingies. But even then, due to 4 years experience with mysql, i still found i was writing a lot of unnecessary code out of habit - and its very difficult to get out of bad habits. When i finally got thinking in sql i hired a freelancer to do part of a project - he was supposed to be competent in sql. I gave him the basic schema and set him to work. A few days before the deadline, after most of the data was entered, i found that he had written the postgres sql in a mysqlish way - thousands of records containing garbage. Had to work upto 20 hours a day for three days to set things right. And cursed mysql on the hour every hour for about 60 hours. Even now, there are still legacy elements of mysql thinking in my sql thinking.

Someone said its practically impossible to teach programming to a person who has learnt basic as his first language. The same thing applies doubled for teaching sql to a person brought up on a diet of mysql. I hear that mysql has now decided that all those useless thingies are now needed and has bolted them onto their app - i shudder to think of the mess that has been created.