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by traceroute66 6 days ago
> it hides some logic from the developers

I do not buy this argument.

Its called a documented function.

The developers know the function's inputs and outputs and what it does.

That's all they should need to know.

Its no different to functions in the libraries of whatever programming language you are using.

Devs just do their coding based off the function signature and docs. They know what goes in, what comes out and what the function does.

How many developers do you know who've gone back and read the source code of the function ? Assuming its open-source anyway and not a OS API.
1 comments
fabian2k 6 days ago
It's more of a problem with triggers. But in the end you're switching languages at that point, and devs that have no problem reading your backend language will not necessarily be good at reading stored procedures. Of course depends on how complex you make them.

And of course devs read the content of functions they call. Unless it's a well written library used by many different people, odds are the function isn't documented well enough and has quirks that force you to understand in more detail how it works. This is not external library code, it's still part of your application.

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traceroute66 6 days ago
> devs that have no problem reading your backend language will not necessarily be good at reading stored procedures

But again ... why do they need to ?

If you are a developer and you want to convert a string to upper case, you just use `strings.ToUpper($foo)` or whatever based on the signature.

Again, its no different with stored procedures.

Dev wants to add a new user ? They look through the stored procedure headers and see a `add_user($foo,$bar)` signature and code a call against that.

Do they need to know that in the background `add_user($foo,$bar)` inserts into table `users`, `groups` etc. ? No.

Infact it makes the dev's life simpler because instead of sending multiple calls themselves (or perhaps forgetting one or two), they just called the stored procedure.

That is my problems with devs who think they are some sort of geniuses that need absolute access to the database because they think nobody can write SQL queries as well as they can ... too many times they come running to me complaining the database is "slow" when in fact it is their sloppy SQL queries that are slow.

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