There are some things in life that, once you get used to them … there’s just no going back. Things like underwear, Malt-O-Meal, Neverwinter Nights, and views.
At work we use databases much, much more than I ever have anywhere else. Because of that, I’ve been forced to stretch and learn more ways to do things efficiently because if things are going slow, we are losing $$$. All that’s nice and good, but the part I’m enjoying as a developer is the convenience of that views, stored procedures and user-defined functions give me.
For instance, I’ll use a recent example. We have three tables that we pull data from a lot, and I’m constantly doing INNER JOIN foo ON bar = poop across a lot of pages. Well, a view lets me take the most critical data of those three tables and lump them all into one subset. So now, I can just do ‘SELECT * FROM view-la-la WHERE foo-poo-pah’ and be done with it.
I really have no idea how I lasted so long without these great features. It’s probably because I was stuck using that other open-source database that has said for years that those features weren’t important. Well, that and because sometimes I won’t try something new if I’m familiar with what I have. Until they stop selling my favorite flavor of Cream of Wheat at the store, and then I *have* to try something different. Mmm… Malt-O-Mealie.
Looks like you are running PostgreSQL these days. Don’t you love it? The only problem is that MySQL is everywhere and sometimes needed. While I use it when I have to, I replace it with PostgreSQL when I can.
Actually, I’m not using postgres at work (or MySQL). In fact, I’m too embarrassed to even say what we are using, so I won’t mention it. We are migrating to pgsql though. Happy days ahead. 🙂