[storm] Storm presentation at Python user group

[Michael Bayer]

On Feb 19, 2008, at 6:08 PM, Duncan McGreggor wrote:

>>
>> but we're talking about the API as of late version 0.2, correct ?
>
> If I recall, it was 0.1. I haven't used SA since late 2005/early 2006.
>
>>
>> In my Pycon presentation I'll be covering how SA 0.2 was an extremely
>> abrupt transition from 0.1 which made for a fragile API and codebase
>> at that time, why the change was necessary, and how we went about
>> becoming a more usable and reliable tool by the late 0.3 series.
>
> Yeah, I got caught in the unenviable position with a client (KCRW in
> LA) where I implemented a solution using 0.1 and they didn't have the
> funds to lay down for the upgrade to 0.2, so they got stuck with a SA
> 0.1 fork with back-ported fixes :-(
>
> It's nice to hear that the API has stabilized, though :-)
>

yeah all I can say is, I'm sorry that so many people jumped onto 0.1,  
which in my mind was completely "hey heres an idea, what do people  
think ? ", as though it were production software, got burned, then  
claimed it sucks.  I was calling it "alpha" while others were  
proclaiming it the best thing since sliced bread.  0.2 was then trying  
to force the API as fast as possible into something that looked more  
like the probable future, before a hundred more people built their  
apps on 0.1.   That's why everything was really shaky at that time, it  
was a temporary rush job.

SQLA was meant as a dynamically growing, "release early / release  
often" kind of product, and while we are pretty solid for production  
right now, this process continues; things will keep changing.  Also  
the only hard "bug" I've ever heard mentioned is Gustavo's frustration  
over transactions, although I'm not aware what the actual "bug" was.   
One of our developers rewrote and cleaned up the transaction  
methodology many months ago and we now support two-phase, SAVEPOINT  
and all that other stuff very nicely.  So it *was* possible to be  
fixed ;)