Automatic table alignment

Automatic table alignment was recently introduced, and we’ve personally experienced a further increase in our productivity. Letting POG Setup take care of keeping objects and tables aligned, really allows you to forget about the underlying database. (Sometimes a bad thing though!)

The following are real-life cases where we truly found automatic table alignment indispensable:

Scenario A
Schema Changes without any hassle
While working in a small team of 3-5 developers, very often, one of the developers will need to modify the underlying table structure to accommodate for a new attribute. POG setup allows the developer to regenerate the PHP object class, align his local database and commit the new object(s) to a common code repository when the code is deemed satisfactory . All the remaining developers then simply need to do a repository update and run POG Setup. Voila! they too have the latest database schema on their machine with database access code that is 100% aligned with the database.

The other side
I have personally experienced work environments where the responsibility boundaries were marked at the database level. That is, where there is a database team and an application team. The problem with this ‘configuration’ is that there is often a misalignment between the database and application because the teams often work at different speeds or due to miscommunication. This is why I personally believe that the way POG handles things allows for more efficient web teams.

Scenario B
Migrating an application from a development machine to a Production machine

When dealing with a database application, it’s almost certain that the database schema will change by the next version release. Usually, when the application goes live, the production database has to be modified so that it contains the new schema.

POG Setup allows the release manager to automate this step. A script can be written to upload the newest source code and run setup at a specific time. No manual steps are then required and what you have is effectively an automated ‘build’ system.

There are a few other scenarios I can think of where the usefulness of automatic table alignment really shines, but the 2 use-cases outlined above are the main ones we’ve personally experienced so far while using POG.

Hope this has shown at least a little bit why we love POG so much!