[Haskell-cafe] Subject: A universal data store interface

[Paul R]

I have quiet a lot of experience in the business of web services
strongly backed by data stores, in a company that allowed me to apply
a technologies such as RubyOnRails, DataMapper, PostgreSQL, Redis, Riak,
HappStack and Snap. Greg, with no offense intended, I will share with
the café a conclusion that we took year to draw, but that made out job
much better since : Abstraction over high level data stores is one of
the worst idea in software engineering.

The most proeminent example is probably PostgreSQL, which is an
incredibly strong product with high SQL power. But as soon as you access
it through the ActiveRecord or Persistent API, it gets turned into
a very limited store, with the SQL power of SQLITE or MongoDB.

So Sergiu, my POV is that universal data stores is at best a glue
targeting small projects, so that they can be hacked quickly. They offer
a set of features that, by design, is the greatest common divisor of the
backends, which unfortunately isn't that great. This is certainly nice
for a do-a-blog-in-5-minutes with "MyFramework init" video tutorial, but
probably not for industrial projects in the long run.

As a side note, the acid-state package that Greg kindly mentioned, takes
a very different approach to data storage, resulting in
a haskell-centric solution with an original features set.

Regarding your other option, the value behind the LLVM backend seems
huge for the whole Haskell community. It has the power to lighten GHC,
improve runtime performance, bring binaries to more platforms and much
more. In my opinion, that's quiet exciting :)


Greg> Hi Sergiu,
Greg> Thanks you for your interest in that proposal. I rushed it off a year
Greg> ago. Since then we have made a lot of improvements to Persistent and
Greg> the library forms a basic building block for most Yesod users and
Greg> other Haskellers. Persistent offers a level of type-safety and
Greg> convenience not available elsewhere (except perhaps for libraries like
Greg> acid-state that are limited to in-memory storage). That being said,
Greg> there are still a lot of improvements that could be made. With the
Greg> effort of a GSoC volunteer we could probably get it to the point of
Greg> being the go-to data storage library for Haskellers, at least those
Greg> planning on using the subset of backends (likely SQL) with great
Greg> support. This proposal is vague and we would need to work with you to
Greg> narrow things down a bit.

Greg> I am biased, but I believe the Yesod project is one of the most
Greg> compelling in the Haskell ecosystem. There are a lot of different ways
Greg> a GSoC project could help make things even better besides improving
Greg> the associated Persistent library, and we would really like to mentor
Greg> at least one GSoC student. I would open more tickets for this in the
Greg> system, but I am not sure how helpful it will be. It seems that we
Greg> need to reach out to more students like yourself, but I am not sure
Greg> how to do that unless I see messages like these first.

Greg> Greg Weber

-- 
  Paul