PostgreSQL

Applications grow and they grow in no time. Every application begins small and then starts adding in new functionalities. Let us say that you are running a small website which deals with classified ads. The service is free in the beginning. Slowly your website catches up and you want to start a paid service. Now is the problem - you have to manage financial transactions as well as the regular data your site hosts. However, now there is a risk - if for any reason, your main site database crashes or is hacked into, you are risking your financial transactions data as well!

Being DBA is one tough job. To design a database is a stressful job as well, and one with a larger degree of difficulties. A large part of the set of difficulties is supplied by the requirement to strike the correct balance between normalization of a database and the speed requirements.

Databases are one thing in the modern development environments without which the world will come to a halt. Right from the small web applications which manage your to-do lists to those like Amazon, databases give them the life, the dynamism which drives the world 2.0 and beyond. QCubed is one framework which takes care of handling databases a whole lot. Yeah, of course you have to create the tables and set them up yourself. QCubed is a development framework after all, not a frontend to your DBMS! But there are a lot of thing which you do not have to worry about as long as you are with QCubed. We will talk about all of them in detail, later on. For now, we will introduce you to the wonders. Let's begin.

SQL Queries

One of the biggest problems which frameworks help you solve is to reduce the amount of code you would write for small repeated work. With a web application, especially a dynamic one, reading data from the database is something one does too often. Now think of a project with about 50 tables and about 30-40 attributes on an average in all of the tables. Sounds complex to write queries for them? To me, yes, it does. Creating queries is not great a deal. What can bug you a lot is when you have added a new column in the table, you need to update quite some code and it is obvious that you will forget a couple of places where you need to do that and that is going to break the application. In addition to this, the update, insert and delete statements bug you too. And what if you accidentally mistype a keyword and the query is wrong? Well, debugging isn't easy, always. And trust me, if you have not been in a development scenario, this is just the tip of the iceberg. As you go on, there are a lot of other things which start rising.

Technology surrounds us. It motivates us, modifies us and makes life easy. And it changes at the speed of electricity. With time, everything has evolved into a faster, improved version. But we stick to the old for long. It is this habit which disallows us to switch over to new things, probably. But while we are trying to figure out how to make the old box work, a new box appears. We show you a few Open Source Projects which you might not have been learning about unless you were interested in them specifically; and we begin with PostgreSQL.