I recently wrote about Veure's test suite and today I'll write a bit about how we manage our database. Sadly, this will be a long post because it's a complicated problem and there's a lot to discuss.

When I first started Veure, I used SQLite to prototype, but it's so incredibly limited that I quickly switched to Postgres. It's been a critically important decision, but I want to take a moment to explain why.

All software effectively has four "phases" which amount to:

1. Initialization
2. Input
3. Calculation
4. Output

Note that we could rewrite the above as:

1. Initialization of data
2. Input of data
3. Calculation of data
4. Output of data

Notice a pattern?

Yeah, I thought so. There are all sorts of areas where we could get things wrong in software, but the further down the stack(s) you go, the more care you need to take because the more damaging bugs can be. Data storage is often pretty low in your stack and you don't want to get this wrong. So what happens?

Over on Perlmonks I wrote that you should probably use this:

say join '', @array[2,4];

Instead of this:

local $" = '';
say "@array[2,4]";

And my reasoning being:

Why is that better? Because nobody knows what $" is, but everyone knows what join() is. Always write your software to be as readable as possible :)

I received a couple of upset replies along the lines of "Perl devs should be allowed to write Perl!" While I generally agree with that sentiment -- I had no problem with the array slice, for example -- I think the replies came, in part, because I had answered too quickly. I clarified what I meant, but I thought I should explain it here, too, because too many people reach for those punctuation variables.