Hi Oleksandr, Thank you for the response. It helps me make my decision by narrowing the options. I cannot help with money. My company doesn't have any (really! our market is non-commercial radio stations) but if the ORM extension turns out well then perhaps it helps some more people to use MDC. But I am a little sad to have confirmation that MDC will receive some love if and only if interest/ROI can be proven. It's weird. To webapp developers such as me (and I hang out on IRC with lots of others) MDC provides an excellent solution to an important and difficult problem that a lot of us face quite frequently. It provides what is effectively a hybrid of a relational SQL DBMS with a structured document store -- exactly the kind of hybrid we need for things like user or client profiles, account configurations, product tables and other such everyday things that are hard to map to tables. So why the lack of interest? I think this is a technical marketing problem. I can try to do my bit from my little corner of a branch of the web dev community if I can make a decent job with the ORM extension I'm working on. If successful, maybe some popular ORMs will follow the idea. Could the Maria community maybe do more to "sell" MDC as it currently exists? I really don't know. But nicely written examples, howtos and case studies are often a good way to promulgate new stuff like this. For what it's worth, here's my work at present https://github.com/tom--/dynamic-ar . I share it for the README which documents motivation, which may be of interest here. The implementation is very early, rough and wrong. Tom On 1/27/15, 5:18 PM, "Oleksandr Byelkin" <sanja@montyprogram.com> wrote:
Hi!
On 27.01.15 16:39, Tom Worster wrote: [skip]
2. In at least two places (one was here
<https://mariadb.com/kb/en/mariadb/indexoptimizations-in-dynamic-columns/
) I've read text with the implied meaning, "we may improve such-and-such about MDC if and when people start actually using it."
True. We can't develop features if there is no money or interest in them. We have some plans but have to be sure before implementing them.
3. The MDC syntax is so clunky I worry that people who might find it useful are turned away.
It is just functions there is nothing about additional syntax.
6. The lack of indexing of dynamic columns is a severe limitation but PostgreSQL manages to index jsonb document properties.
There is plans about functional indexes for dynamic columns and for virtual columns but plans should be supported by money or people.
And then...
7. I head a rumor that some kind of JSON features are coming to Maria.
All plans I know about JSON connected to dynamic columns (as a storage for JSON). But I have to say that plans have no dates and versions yet.
So, do Maria's Dynamic Columns have a future?
Are my fears that MDC will be neglected as some better solution to the same problem receives all the attention? If you or somebody else make something better for MariaDB then yes it is
Yes. possible that Dynamic columns can be neglected, but there is no such threat now.
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