Recently I was reading the meep post on Moans Nogood’s blog, and especially the comment about the database agnostic applications struck me.
In my job I see a lot of application vendors who proudly claim that their applications are database agnostic. Which is for me enough to classify that application with the garbage.
Ok, you paid a lot of money for your database license, and then some vendor comes in and says: “Yes, a lot of functionality is already provided in the database, but we are not using it” and he/she is actually proud on that.
Not only they are re-inventing the wheel, buth they also shows that they have no idea how the database works.
If they did, they would know that it is not the limitation on the length of the field or table names, nor which keywords are being used, that set databases apart, but the concurrency model. And apart from limiting the database to keyed reads and writes, there is no way you can make your application run on multiple databases.
