database

Back in a previous company (the same place as where Debugging GDI Handle Leaks happened), there was an interesting convention in the database: all tables had a unique 3-letter prefix assigned to them, and all columns in that table must start with the prefix, which I’ve written about before. For example, a person table would have the prefix PEO, and the columns would be PEO_PersonID, PEO_FirstName, PEO_DateOfBirth, etc. When you wanted to create a new table, you opened the shared Excel sheet, added your table to the bottom, and made up a prefix that wasn’t already in the sheet....

I haven’t seen Expand-Contract written about in some years, and I think it is a great way of performing database schema migrations without the need for application downtime. I also realised that it also applies to microservices and service-to-service communication in general. The Easy Example One of the two examples given is wanting to change how an address is stored in a database. The schema starts off looking like this:...

We work we have a number of windows services which each have a lot of stats they could expose. Currently they are only interrogatable by the logfiles and from any notifications we receive. I have been toying with the idea of hosting a website in-process which would give a simple dashboard ui and access to a live view of the log file. The idea first struck me when I was experimenting with FubuMvc, as they have an EmbeddedFubuMvcServer, which is very easy to use:...

In the last post we looked at using custom ID types to help abstract the column type from the domain. This works well until you start trying to load and save entities using an ORM, as the ORM has not way to know how to map a column to a custom type. ORMs provide extension points to allow you to create these mappings. As I tend to favour using Dapper, we will go through setting it up to work with our custom ID types....

The Database is just an Implementation Detail A quote from Martin Fowler given during his Architecture talk stated that the Database in your application should just be an implementation detail. I agree on this wholeheartedly and find that its really not that difficult to achieve if you think about your architecture carefully. Having said that, I still see parts of the database implementation leaking out into the domain, mainly in the form of IDs....