More about Prevalence

Joshua writes about the delusions between "prevalence" and database systems.

"...in terms of functionality, Query Processing, Storage and Indexing are rarely things that a programmer can implement better than the professionals. Most of the innovation in terms of "persistence" layers revolves around the Data Access layer, and the fundamentals of the rest of the storage stack remain relevant."

That's a great point. I decided to add the prevalence layer to my application mainly for the following 2 reasons:

- The record count is small. In my case less than a dozen. My queries are only hash table lookups.
- It was far easier to write the business logic using classes rather than tables/stored procedures

I don't think it's quite fair to compare the two systems in most respects. They are each best suited for areas that lightly overlap. In this case both are not a hammer.