this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2023
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Programming
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I'm always curious about this particular feature/argument. From the aspect of "i can unit test easier because the interface is abstracted, so I can test with no database." Great. (though there would be a debate on time saved with tests versus live production efficiency lost on badly formed automatic SQL code)
For anything else, I have to wonder how often applications have actual back-end technologies change to that degree. "How many times in your career did you actually replace MSSQL with Oracle?" Because in 30 years of professional coding for me, it has been never. If you have that big of a change, you are probably changing the core language/version and OS being hosted on, so everything changes.
If you are building software where the customer is the deployer being flexible on what database can be used is a pretty big step. Without it could turn off potential customers that have already existing infastructure.
Some of us have had to support multiple database targets. So I don't know about changing a database in a running application, but a good abstraction has made it easier to extend support and add clients when we could quickly and easily add new database providerz
Well, developing on SQLite and deploying to Postgres is a much more common scenario than migrating your data from one DBMS to another.
Working in a data intensive context, I saw such migrations very often, from and to oracle, ms sql, postgres, sas, exasol, hadoop, parquet, Kafka. Abstraction, even further than orms, is extremely helpful.
Unfortunately in most real case scenarios companies don't value abstraction, because it takes time that cannot be justified in PI plannings and reviews. So people write it as it is quicker, and migrations are completely re write. A lot of money, time and resources wasted to reinvent the wheel.
Truth is that who pays doesn't care, otherwise they'd do it differently. They deserve the waste of money and resources.
On the other hand, now that I think of it, I've never seen a real impacting OS migration. Max os migration I've seen is from centos or suse to rhel... In the field I work on, non unix OSes are always a bad choice anyway