If you access your (SQL/relational/typed) database with DBI/DBD, you really get (sort of) a typeless database.

Read a record with a "string" field containing only figures, put it in a scalar, multiply it by something, store it again in the scalar and save it in the database: the data start as a string, gets silently converted to an integer or float (as need be) and gets saved as a string again. Perl has taken care of all type-conversions.

So what are we complaining about? The small effort of setting-up the database? I actually find that a Good Thingtm as it makes you think about your data, but YMMV.

And if you want to skip even that little effort, declare all your fields to be 'VARCHAR' (max. length 255) or 'TEXT' (max. length 65,535) in MySQL.

One single type to rule them all and in the database bind them! Looks pretty (and) typeless to me.

CountZero

"If you have four groups working on a compiler, you'll get a 4-pass compiler." - Conway's Law

In reply to Re: Typeless Relational Database by CountZero
in thread Typeless Relational Database by tomazos

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