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Ricardo Giro
Ricardo Giro

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Some structural planning

So my first conversation with GPT was a bit overwhelming. There's a lot of stuff that goes into planning an app that I wasn't aware of, but they all do seem necessary (or at least beneficial); however, I probably don't need to go for all the planning methods.

From the start I told it I would be using ASP.NET and some form of relational database. Some things kept coming up during the conversation:

Object-Relational Mapping

Apparently there are frameworks that work as intermediaries between DBs and the app itself. Fantastic! But as I dug deeper, the rabbit hole revealed itself.

As I understand it, you make your DBs schema and map it to your applications model using the ORM which manages the connection between them (EF Core was suggested since I'm using dotnet). The question is... what's an application model? I also saw mentions of model-view-viewmodel which probably fits into that category.

Database Choice

I want to use some sort of relational database and since I'm pretty comfortable with SQL, I asked GPT for some recommendations:

  • SQLite which I used in CS50 is filebased and very easy to use but I was looking for something server-based.but MariaDB is server-based instead of file-based.

  • PostgreSQL aims to be big and scalable but was probably way more than I need for this small project. It seems very strong for when you need great security and stability for big apps.

  • MySQL/MariaDB is pretty light and seems easy enough to install on my Fedora machine. MariaDB is advertised as the clear upgrade to base MySQL. I also don't have experience with MySQL which is a plus.

  • Microsoft SQL Server is the big one. I'm pretty familiar with it and its Management Studio program, and although the Express version is perfect for this project, I want to learn new things
    **
    I ended up choosing MariaDB**. Had to uninstall a previous problematic installation but I got it working with a test DB in 5 minutes!!

I'll make a future post with how I'm sketching up my DBs schema.

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