Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's absolutely true that migrations in SQL databases can be a pain. I don't actually think that's a bad thing - what's really going on there is that the DBMS is throwing data integrity issues into your face, and encouraging you to think about them. A lot of developers don't want to do that, because they want to think of data integrity as this tangential concern that's largely a distraction from their real job. A lot…
I am very fond of pushing as much validation into the database as I can, so I use `NOT NULL`, foreign keys, `CHECK` constraints, and whatever I can to let the database do the job of ensuring valid data. All of us make mistakes, and making sure there are no exceptions is just what computers are good at. I think you're right about "a lot of developers", but I find data modeling, including finding the invariants, pretty…
Re: Consistency is Consistently Undervalued
#131That's not ESR's point. It's shoplifted from Brooks.