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by Joakal 5341 days ago
As a startup, change of minds is pretty normal to the point that it's far more better to have the tools to quickly implement it rather than plan/document it well. The only documentation is the general gist behind the database.

If it prototypes well, then further refine it with ER diagrams for future maintenance.

Why is planning everything without validation better than above?
2 comments
einhverfr 5341 days ago
Disagree here. Figure an hour of planning saves 10 hrs dev time and 100 hrs bugfixing.

That doesn't mean spending months planning. It does mean doing your best to plan over a few days, then prototype, review, and start implementing. If things change, you now have a clearer idea of the issues and can better address them.

The worst thing you can do is go into development both blind and without important tools you need to make sure that requirements are met--- tools like check constraints, referential integrity, and the like.

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hello_moto 5341 days ago
small to medium changes? find a better migration tools.

large changes? throw away and start over; tools like Rails can help you get up and running really quickly.

I rarely see people go back and fix the mess.

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hammerdr 5341 days ago
To be frank, you're talking out of your ass.

Maintenance takes up about 50% of all IT budget [1]. Most individual pieces of software will spend 2-6 times (considering the average life cycle of an in production software product to be 2-4 years) more money on being maintained than being developed.

Data migration is a massive problem for any organization with data sets at any scale. RDBMS, in general, has gotten in the way of those migrations. People aren't looking at NoSQL just because they cannot sit still but instead are looking to find a better experience with handling data.

I'm not sure if NoSQL is the right answer to that but let's give it a chance and see what happens when people are migrating MongoDB data in 3-4 years.

[1] http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/technology-budgets-2010-mainte...

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einhverfr 5341 days ago
Integration issues are best handled with good API's. Migration issues are a bigger issue but one thing that good use of RDBMS's give you is the ability to ensure your migrated data is meaningful. Not sure you can do that with KVM-type stores.
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