O Payan, O Pefon, Otapiapia! - Issue #13

If you’re not Yoruba, I really apologize for the title of this newsletter..but there’s a routine to my craziness and you’ll understand me pretty soon.

Today, the disco light is shining on full-stack developers, and for good reason. We’ve been talking about frontend and backend devs since forever. Izz their time to shine. 

Anyway, about the title of the newsletter today. Honestly, that was the first thing that came to my mind when I thought of writing about full-stack developers. 

All those street traders that sell insecticides with wheelbarrows and usually have a loudspeaker that wails this line all day:

Translation: 

If you grew up in Nigeria, you should’ve heard this popular jingle on the streets. 

Anyway, I say this because it’s somehow similar to the job description of full stack developers. These guys do everything when it comes to web development. It’s like a Jack-of-all-trades situation. 

Full-stack developers handle everything: servers, databases, systems, APIs designs. Everything really. 

They were the one’s Olamide was referring to when he said;

“She carry front, 

she carry back…she too package….” 😭😭🤧🤧

Anyway, like I said before, we’ve talked about frontend and backend, so I’ll just go into databases for now. Thinking about it sef, I touched a bit on SQL previously, but don’t worry, we’ll run this.

So, as with every sector of anything in tech or development, there are a number of databases, but I’ll just talk about a few of them.

Mongo DB is a document-based database.

The good thing about Mongo is that it’s scalable and it supports searching by field, range queries, and regular expression searches.

You can index any field in a Mongo document and Mongo also provides you with replica sets. 

Another cool thing about Mongo is the fact that it’s flexible and you don’t have to normalise data before doing anything.

MongoDB can run over many servers while maintaining beauty and balancing the load or duplicating data to prevent system errors or failure.

MySQL is properly one of the most popularly used relational databases and it’s probably the best for structured data and cloud-native applications.

MySQL is compatible with many platforms and languages. It can handle large volumes of data. Like a whole lot and it’s still pretty fast.

It supports JOIN operations and is pretty tight on security.

Oracle works across platforms and it’s ACID compliant. This means that you can ensure the integrity of your data with Oracle. 

One cool thing about the oracle database is that it has a logical data structure and this basically means you can use the database without knowing it is a physical location. 

It also has a memory cache feature that helps developers work with large amounts of data. 

Also if you’re really concerned about the security and efficiency of your systems, Oracle database is probably the best for you.

No SQL said what it said: Not SQLs😏

You’d probably wonder what its beef with SQL is because SQL is not a bad bish.

The thing is just that No SQL does things differently. 

NoSQL uses data technologies that store data that are either fully, partially or totally structured or polymorphic. 

It’s a relational database and it doesn’t require a fixed schema to function. Basically, you don’t need to define rows and columns before storing anything in NoSQL. 

Just put in the data and you’re good to go.

NoSQL saves time because it stores data in ways that make it easier to understand.  You also do less work when you’re restoring NoSQL APIs because apps just find it easy to process. 

NoSQL is easy to scale and is perfect for large data storage. 

One other cool thing about NoSQL is the fact that it has an easily navigable interface for storage and data queries.

Additionally, NoSQL can actually provide you with zero downtime. No jokes.

Dazzal! This wraps up our talk on full-stack development for this week. 

Follow us on Twitter and Instagram and stay tuned!

If you own a business, Bumpa can help you track your debtors and transactions, you even get a free website that you can manage on your mobile phone. Download the Bumpa app here.

Love and light,

Precious from Consonance.