We’re excited to launch a new series on our blog: the jOOQ Tuesdays. In this series, we’ll publish an article on the third Tuesday every month where we interview someone we find exciting in our industry from a jOOQ perspective. This includes people who work with SQL, Java, Open Source, and a variety of other related topics.
We have the pleasure of starting this series with Yalım Gerger who will show us why he thinks that Oracle PL/SQL developers are more than ready for Git!
Hi Yalım – you’re the founder of Gerger, the company behind Formspider. What’s Formspider?
Hi. Formspider is an application development framework for Oracle PL/SQL developers. It enables PL/SQL developers to build high quality business applications using only PL/SQL as the programming language. No Java or JavaScript skills are needed to use Formspider.
Interesting, even from a Java developer’s perspective! Essentially, you’re offering a way to completely bypass Java as middleware (and of course HTML, JavaScript, CSS).
This is not entirely true. We still use Java in our product. Formspider has a middletier application that our customers can deploy to any JEE compliant application server. This middletier application helps us bridge Formspider JavaScript library running in the client’s browser to the PL/SQL running in the database. We also use Java Libraries to generate Excel files from the data stored in an application, a common use case for business applications. So yes, the applications are not coded in Java. Our customers are PL/SQL developers. But we use Java to improve our product. Same with HTML and Javascript. Our job is to understand these technologies and their capabilities really well and expose them as intuitive API’s to PL/SQL developers.
Do you also have customers that access their PL/SQL APIs both through Formspider as well as through their home-grown Java / .NET applications?
Yes. We have customers who have both PL/SQL teams that work with Formspider and Java teams that work with Java technologies. This requires a great deal of collaboration between two teams and that’s not always possible.
Usually, what happens is that Java/.NET teams try to move the application away from the database as much as possible. I was just talking to a friend who works at a large financial institution in which the OO guys are pushing hard to eliminate all the PL/SQL API’s. He was going mad. There are various reasons for this. It is partly political turf wars, partly pure ignorance about the capabilities of database software and PL/SQL.
We can feel the pain. There is no such thing as a magic bullet… So what should they do then? How should an application be architected? Do you think there is a “right” architecture?
No. I think it depends so much on the context. Are you building a consumer app or are you building a business app? Are you a company building a horizontal product or an IT department serving a business operating in a particular vertical? There are so many parameters to consider. At the risk of being too generic, I think an IT department serving a large enterprise should not try build a database agnostic application. That’s silly. On the contrary it should take full advantage of the database software, and other software it uses. You shouldn’t pretend to be seven different organizations building seven different layers of the application just happen to be collaborating. You are just one organization. Act like that. Cut through the fat. Integrate as deeply as you can. This is the most cost effective way to build well performing applications on time and on budget. Database agnostic software is for horizontal software companies.
We’ve recently blogged about the caveats of dual licensing, where we said that shipping our sources to paying customers is essential for a company that calls themselves an Open Source company like Data Geekery does. I’ve seen you ship your sources as well – but you’re not really doing “Open Source”. How would you describe your offering?
I loved that blog post by the way. I think the way jOOQ is licensed is brilliantly fair i.e. it is free if the database is free and it has a price tag if your database has a license fee. In our case, the database always has a license fee. So we don’t have a free option for Formspider. For the Oracle community and for the price tags that they are used to, our license fee is so small that it is practically free. Anyone who is thrown off by our price tag is probably not serious about using Formspider anyway.
Our customers who sign up for our highest level of support service may get the source code of our product for the duration of the professional service. This option is attractive for customers who invest a lot into the application they build with Formspider.
Yes, Oracle price tags have a reputation… Yalım, you seem to be an Oracle person. And as such, you are about to launch gitora. What is it?
Gitora is a free version control tool that integrates the Oracle database with Git. This is a little embarrassing to bring up in a blog mainly read by Java developers but very common version control tasks that most Java developers take for granted are very hard to do in PL/SQL. There is a good reason for this. PL/SQL has no concept of a working directory. PL/SQL is not a file based language i.e. source code units do not reside in the private file system of a developer but in the Oracle database as packages, procedures and functions globally available to any developer. That makes version control very difficult if not impossible.
So what do people do?
Nothing mostly. Daily backups are used as a way to get back to a previous state of the code if needed.
Some teams create one working directory that is hooked to version control and store all their PL/SQL code in this directory by extracting the DDL’s, usually manually. That’s as sophisticated as it gets.
Proper team development and merging in PL/SQL is very difficult and I haven’t seen it done successfully very often. And I’ve interacted with a lot of PL/SQL teams all around the World. Gitora makes this very easy. It turns the database schema to a working directory. If you execute a Git command, any change to the working directory happens automatically in your database schema.
Interesting. We’ve recently implemented a home-grown “solution” for a customer, which implements automatic version control and installation from a Microsoft Team Foundation Server repository. Maybe, we should migrate to Gitora then?
I didn’t know that. That’s so cool. If you build a version control tool which works for PL/SQL and talks to TFS instead of Git, I think that is also very valuable. Essentially we build the same product but used different version control products. I encourage you to put it out there.
Why not. Maybe we’ll contribute!
Thanks for this very interesting insight, Yalım!
If this interview has triggered your interest, follow Yalım, FormSpider, or Gitora on Twitter:
For more information about Gitora, watch the Gitora tutorial:
| Reference: | jOOQ Tuesdays: Yalim Gerger brings Git to Oracle from our JCG partner Lukas Eder at the JAVA, SQL, AND JOOQ blog. |
