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0 pointsscarface749y ago0 comments

Show me your well structured code and well named unit tests and I won't need your flow charts.

Show me your well defined normalized tables and I have all I need.

But for the love of $entity please don't show me tons of business logic in stored procedures. I actually won't work for a company that expects me to build or maintain a product based on stored procs.

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8 comments · 2 top-level

cafard9y ago· 6 in thread

Show me your well-defined normalized tables, and I will know the rules for a valid state of the system. How, though, will I know the rules for a valid transition from one state to another? Have I seen some nasty stored procedures? Yes, a number of which I have written. But I have seen well thought out and useful ones also.

scarface74OP9y ago

With logic being in code:

* it is easily unit tested

* all source code is one place that can be branched, versioned, merged, deployed, rolled back, diffed, code reviewed, approved with pull request etc.

duozerk9y ago

Or you can simply implement it so that when your code runs it first checks that the stored procedures exist and have the same definition as the one stored in the source code; and to drop/recreate them if that's not the case.

In which case the stored procedures are in your "main" code repo and "deploying" them simply means running the software. Though your point about unit tests stands.

adaml_6239y ago

Why are your stored procedures not in the code repo?

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spacemanmatt9y ago

SQL is code. Not sure how that escapes people.

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agentultra9y ago

And you can unit test it too.

http://pgtap.org

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spacemanmatt9y ago

I like to use table-driven transition constraints. The basic design is, you have a table of valid transitions (begin state, end state) and a function that you can write a constraint with.

It's the same as other code, but with better data locality.

vog9y ago

> Show me your well structured code and well named unit tests and I won't need your flow charts.

Please note that the quote uses old language. With "flowcharts" they actually meant what we know call "structured code".

More precisely, the flowcharts were the hand-written program which was then translated into machine code or some kind of assembly. In other words, back then the flowcharts were the highest level code.

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