All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

Transactions? Who needs transactions?

Ovid on 2005-09-06T00:01:02

Some of you may recall how the MySQL docs used to argue that foreign key constraints were a bad idea and did not belong in the database. They no longer include this embarrassing discussion in their docs ("hey, I got rid of 'strict' and my program worked!") but many of their users still don't get it.

Witness a recent /. discussion and a reply where the poster writes "I've never missed transactions. The one time they would have been nice I was able to catch the exception and delete the incomplete information."

Do I really need to say anything?

I was going to say something...

sigzero on 2005-09-06T01:21:21

But my mouth just kept opening and closing...

Don't get me started...

Alias on 2005-09-06T07:29:15

All this stuff about MySQL, and yet I seem to be the only person that gets pissed off about auto_increment and needs proper sequence support.

The day that MySQL gets sequences, I'll stop calling it a piece of useless low-end shit. I promise.

Re:Don't get me started...

tinman on 2005-09-06T08:51:48

Heh, I remember a time when SQL Server (yes, the Microsoftian version) didn't have sequences. I was doing a porting project from Oracle and they actually ended up implementing sequences as a server side procedure. It was ghastly.

Re:Don't get me started...

lachoy on 2005-09-06T19:40:00

does MSSQL (or Sybase for that matter) have sequences now? I thought you accomplished this action only through IDENTITY fields...

Re:Don't get me started...

tinman on 2005-09-07T16:45:52

I haven't had reason to work with MS-SQL since so I am not sure. A bit of Googling reveals that they don't. To be fair, this was more of being used to the control and convenience of Oracle sequences than anything else.

Re:Don't get me started...

Alias on 2005-09-07T08:54:43

*cough* DBIx::MySQLSequence *cough*

Re:Don't get me started...

tinman on 2005-09-07T16:50:14

*sigh* project ended somewhere in 2002. Looking at the date submitted, it seems that I may have just missed its' arrival on CPAN.

At least I'll be better informed in the future; thanks.

Recent?

kelan on 2005-09-06T16:05:32

I agree with you, except about the discussion being recent. That topic and comment were posted to Slashdot in 1999.

Incidentally, the Slashcode engine does allow you to see the year of a post, it's just not set to by default. When I found out, I was quite pleased, because it can be very confusing not knowing the year of a comment. To do so, look under your Preferences, in the Homepage section. The Date/Time Format setting is near the top.

Re:Recent?

jdavidb on 2005-09-06T17:55:28

The year is also in the link.

Re:Recent?

Ovid on 2005-09-06T18:48:17

Wow. Five years ago. How the hell did I miss that? Bizarre.