Re: Honesty vs Opinion vs The Truth - Best IBM i Tool Set

<Rob>I am most interested in what gives me the best bang for the long term.

My take...

Triggers obviously will catch anything and everything. This can be a good
thing depending on whether you have issues with many apps all doing
INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE actions against the same table. It also has the more
complicated infrastructure (two languages, two environments (PASE/ILE),
more complicated debugging, more complicated deployment, etc). If you have
A LOT of applications inserting/updating that you don't have control over
then this can be a good approach and worth the pain. If you do NOT have a
lot of apps inserting/updating then this approach is overkill (IMO) and can
instead be organized in your PHP code.

Even 10yrs down the road you can make it so rows are only inserted via a
REST call to PHP. If you have apps that are doing so much inserting that
they need crazy performance and the REST PHP is too slow then you need to
ask yourself why that other application isn't written in PHP (assuming it
is in-house).

I guess at the end of the day I am just not sold on the "RPG in the DB"
approach because it slows things down so much (aka missed deadlines).

Aaron Bartell
litmis.com - Services for open source on IBM i

Aaron,

Am I understanding that you're promoting the idea of limiting updating
tables (insert, update, delete) to only a REST call to a PHP app (proxy) as
a BETTER solution to putting all business rules at the DB level using
triggers?

We can never assume when or where a table update will come from or expect
to "control" it. The whole idea of the IBM i is a database is a "jack of
all trades" server. The data request can come from anywhere. RPG, Java,
PHP, JSP, Ruby, web service, bluetooth, punch card....

Now, while I think agree that the trigger solution would work if
implemented properly, it's unrealistic for 99% of shops with existing
infrastructure.

But, I think the idea of even suggesting you should limit DB updates to
just one "pipe"... well, I'll say it... dag nabbit... unconstitutional. :)
You can't "make it so rows are only inserted via a REST call to PHP".

Brad
www.bvstools.com