Thursday, September 11, 2008

Meta post: Querying languages versus APIs

This is a meta post about the differences between having a querying language and an API for accessing a database. I want to analyze the pros and cons of both approaches. I believe there are benefits of both models, and that they both have weaknesses.
These are my initial ideas on what to discuss in the post:
  • An API provides a type safe way of operating with the data model.
  • An API cannot expose query injection weaknesses.
  • Queries to in a query languages are handled completely internally in the engine, and can therefore be optimized more easily.
Please comment with references on querying languages and your opinion on the pros and cons of the two approaches.

Meta post: Introducing the concept of meta posts

I am introducing a new kind of post in this journal. Meta posts. I have a list of posts that I want to write, each of these are going to be long, and take a while to write. Therefore I thought it would be easier for me, and lead to better posts, if I could get comments on them before I write them. That way I can find out what aspects of the topic to discuss as well as get some references that might be useful for the post.

These meta posts will carry the tag meta post and I will greatly appreciate any comment on these posts. One of the key features of the meta posts is that I will keep them short, which is why this post ends here.