[Haskell-cafe] DB vs read/show for persisting large data

[Michael Snoyman]

On Wed, Dec 14, 2011 at 3:31 PM, C K Kashyap <ckkashyap at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> It has been on my todo list for some time now. I'd like to write a GTD tool
> that has dependency tracking support. Haskell seems like a good choice for
> this. I was wondering if there has been any past attempts with this?
>
> One thing that has been bothering me has been this - the persistence of
> data. Should I use sqlite(or someother DB) or should I use Haskell's
> read/show functions to read from and write to a file? I am slightly not
> inclined towards NOT using DB because I want to implement all the business
> logic in Haskell. I want to avoid having to generate SQL.
>
> It'll be great if I could get some feedback on the "read/show" approach - is
> this even a viable option?
>
> Regards,
> Kashyap

Definite *don't* use read/show: if you make any updates to your data
structures, all old files will be lost. I would recommend either using
some standard file format (JSON/YAML... or even XML if you like) or
using a database. If you want to avoid writing SQL, Persistent[1] may
be a good fit.

Michael

[1] http://www.yesodweb.com/book/persistent