Realm – A New Mobile Database

A new mobile database for iOS (Android support coming soon) launched earlier this week called Realm. Given that up to this point your options were SQLite or something built on top of SQLite like Core Data or YapDatabase, it’s kind of a big deal. SQLite is great,...
Geopolitical Consequences of SQL Design

Geopolitical Consequences of SQL Design

Or: the consequences of not using many-to-many relationships Is Moroccan food African or Mediterranean?  We designed a simple hierarchical model of cuisines that grouped them by broad geographic area.  The purpose of the model was solely to populate a configurable,...
Cornice and SQLAlchemy

Cornice and SQLAlchemy

Cornice provides helpers to build and document REST-ish Web Services with Pyramid; and SQLAlchemy is the best Python ORM. I wanted to use Cornice and SQLAlchemy to make a simple RESTful webapp and couldn’t find any info on how to put them together. Here’s...
Custom fields in Rails

Custom fields in Rails

What approach do you take when adding dynamic attributes to model objects stored in a traditional database?  Let’s say a bug model with static fields like name and species also needs to support any number of additional dynamic fields specified by different bug...