Is python good for making database work short?
Paul McNett
p at ulmcnett.com
Wed Jun 18 21:48:10 EDT 2003
Steve writes:
> Today at work I got an impressive demonstration.
> There was a database mess that had to be cleaned up fast.
> A coworker who is a foxpro nut did all of this in about 3 lines of
> code.
> I was very impressed, and I plan to learn foxpro since the job has
> legacy apps written in it.
FoxPro shines at manipulating data. There is no finer tool for that purpose.
> However I was wondering if python could have made this job this easy.
> Does python make manipulating databases and data short work?
I am a FoxPro developer switching to Python. Python offers a good DB
specification and a bunch of modules to access any kind of backend data.
Python also offers good basic types to store cursor-like views of the data
(a list of dictionaries would provide a recordset-like object, where you
can reference the fields by name).
> Part of the program we had to make also required doing many queries to
> check the integrity of the data, and if it wasn't kosher, store the
> bad data to a table for examination later. In foxpro it was one line
> of code to save the query into a table. In java it would have been
> another trek like the one I described above.
Yes all this stuff is built-in to fox, because of fox's xbase
local-cursor-engine.
> Java is great for a lot of stuff, but the jdbc is basically just a
> pipe into the database to pass sql through with a lot of gymnastics to
> get the sql into, massaged and out of the pipe.
>
> Anyway, I would love to have an open source, multiplatform tool that
> could match foxpro in ease of database manipulation.
Nothing can match FoxPro in data manipulation. But FoxPro is proprietary,
closed-source and single-platform. And it can be killed at any time
whenever Microsoft decides to.
> Is python it?
Python is my choice for a new primary development language. I'm missing
FoxPro's native cursor engine and XBase dialect, but am finding that Python
can handle everything, and I'm also finding that I think I'll like Python's
way better for the long term.
Python shares FoxPro's flexibility in many ways: no need to declare
variables, developer-choice to do oop or procedural programming,
developer-choice to use local database or backend db server, rapid
prototyping, live command interpreter, etc. etc.
I'm not a Pythonista yet but think that that status isn't as far away as I
might have thought when I started down this road 6 or so weeks ago....
--
Paul McNett
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