Monday, September 10, 2012

Goodbye OpenRasta - Hello Nancy


This is a painful post to write as I still feel a strong residual loyalty to OpenRasta (OR) however I have now moved over the Nancy and so I would like to give you my reasons why. These are not technical reasons, far from it, instead I give you nothing more than sorrowful account of feelings hurt, a comparison between the brutal, distant and dominant love provided by OR versus the beautiful, seductive and submissive framework that is sweet Nancy.

Wednesday, May 09, 2012

RavenDB or SQL Server? Which one should I use?

SQL Server is not a database for storing anything except ad-hoc reporting data. It is splendid for that, ad-hoc reports, data-mining, real time relationship discovery - and its optimal for these uses because way back when Codd designed the rules, that is what it was designed for (see The Data Driven Conspiracy for more details)

Of course you can store other types of data in a relational database. For example you can serialise your domain state to a SQL Server database and retrieve that state at a later date but this is a terrible use of a relational system. So bad, in fact, that whole layers of code (so called 'data-layers', or DALs), many thousands of lines, are required to make this kind of task remotely do-able, testable, maintainable.

The great, decades long confidence trick has been for the SQL based retailers to convince us that there was no better way to store hierarchical / document data other than real-time conversion between radically different data-structures. DALs and the latest ORM have all been trumpeted but, in the end, these are nothing more than codecs to thunk your bits back and forth between different data organisations - different patterns on the disk.

Madness!

Agile and Cost Breakdowns


At the beginning of an Agile project it is often very tricky to provide a cost breakdown for individual items of work. This is because central to the Agile methodology is the demand that at the start of a project everybody admits they do not really know what details to expect! This is a brave thing to do. It is brave of a developer to admit that the implementation details of a proposed project are not clear. It is brave of a client to accept that they do not really know, in real-life detail, what it is they want. The pay back for all this honesty is a much better chance that the project will be useful, delivered on time and delivered within budget.