This is from the SQLite creator D. Richard Hipp who is always worth reading, but, I'd like to recommend reading what TCL's creator John Ousterhout has to say.
His article on threads from 1995 was highly influential on me, and I remember it to this day. More recently (2018, revised and expanded in 2021), he published a book on software engineering practices called A Philosophy of Software Design which is, in my opinion, the best in its category.
+100 for his book. TIL he created TCL also. The book is excellent and one of the very resources that talks about architecture independent of language or tech-stack used.
Like Lamport, who is more widely known for (what was originally) his side project LaTeX than for his seminal distributed systems research including Paxos, Ousterhout tends to be more widely known by name for (what was originally) his side project Tcl than for his seminal distributed systems research including Raft.
> Early versions of SQLite (prior to 2004) operated on the classic TCL principal that "everything is a string". Beginning with SQLite3 (2004-06-18), SQLite also supports binary data.
> However, types are still very flexible in SQLite, just as they are in TCL. SQLite treats the datatypes on column names in a CREATE TABLE statement as suggestions rather than hard requirements
This is something I do not much like. Its not compulsory (you can create "strict" tables). It works well in TCL which is an entire language designed around the idea. Less so in SQL.
One of the advantages of RDBMSes is that not accepting obviously wrong data makes life easier for developers. You can debug an issue that happens on inserting the data, not when you find the wrong type or other bad much later on.
This typing behaviour, now in combination with strict tables, is a boon for biostats. When you get shitty data to be cleaned, you've got 3 main choices: 1.use slow and untyped scripting languages, 2.use a strictly typed database, meaning you'll have to clean your data in advance, or 3.load it all as strings into SQLlite, then clean the data until it fits into a strict table with check constraints. IMO, it's pretty clear 3 is best by far!
Back in the day, the Tcl conferences (and the EuroTcl in Europe) were great sources of information. Only about half of the presentations were for Tcl internals and extensions. The rest were about other projects that were using Tcl in some way or other, and it was fascinating to learn about completely different areas of software.
> For example, the byte-code engine used to evaluate SQL statements inside of SQLite is implemented as a large "switch" statement inside a "for" loop, with a separate "case" for each opcode, all in the "vdbe.c" source file.
His article on threads from 1995 was highly influential on me, and I remember it to this day. More recently (2018, revised and expanded in 2021), he published a book on software engineering practices called A Philosophy of Software Design which is, in my opinion, the best in its category.
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