From: RH1
To: Editor
Date: 28 Feb 2005
I've been an avid reader of your site for a couple of years,
and thought this could possibly make for "quote of the week"
material.
It's starting to appear corporations are no longer satisfied
with the death grip they have on our universities, now they want to expand to
our high schools.
" America's high schools are obsolete," Gates said. "By
obsolete, I don't just mean that they're broken, flawed or underfunded [sic],
though a case could be made for every one of those points. By obsolete, I mean
our high schools — even when they're working as designed — cannot teach all our
students what they need to know today."
I'm not sure where he's going with this, but I'm pretty sure
it ends with selling more product.
From: Fabian Pascal
To: RH
I've noticed that in the news.
He means, what corporations need them to know, which is,
well, mostly nothing. [Corporations are about training and conformity, not
knowledge and thinking].
There is no education system, only a training and
socialization system, making sure nobody knows much beyond tools, or thinks
very much.
I am not surprised. The American empire, like all empires, is
decaying fast and there is nothing that can be done about it.
To: Editor
From: RH2
Date: 21 Feb 2005
Mike Stonebraker delivered the keynote at the Ingres
Conference in Kansas City in November.
He put up a slide containing more or less your Quote of the Week and
proceeded to talk fluently about something or other. I can assure you, at my
table we all switched off at that point and started planning where to go for
dinner. I think that reflects well on my colleagues understanding, if not their
courtesy. But in hindsight it was a pity we switched off because we missed the
full unhappy significance of his words.
Chatting about it later with someone who bothered to listen
to the rest of what he had to say, I was told that his comments on relational
DBMSs proved to be even more puzzling than they seemed at first, because the
problem he went on to describe, and his solution to it, appeared to have
nothing whatever to do with managing data, but rather more to do with
instantaneous filtering and switching problems. To quote my source: "Since no information is intended to be
kept, what the hell would even an infinitely fast DBMS do to solve his
problem?!" Why raise the issue? Why pretend that RDBMS performance is
other than implementation-dependent?
His eagerness to discuss the commercial possibilities of his
latest enthusiasm might be described by a less charitable person as (at least)
vulgar, if not nakedly avaricious. He
can claim Y is a solution and X is not, confident that most of his audience
will lazily assume that X was intended to be a solution and therefore esteem Y
more highly. Is this perhaps a new
standard in intellectual shabbiness? Well, no; even as I wrote that I realized
it's not.
To: RH2
From: Fabian Pascal
This has been a pattern with Stonebraker ever since I
remember. In fact, I never heard anything from him that impressed me, his
achievements notwithstanding. And I have always been highly suspicious of
academics with business interests; they are vendors, and behave accordingly.
Perhaps people ought to inquire into the history of his
previous "enthusiasm", Illustra, and what happened to the company
that bought it in order to stave off decline, Informix. He was making similar
noises then.
If people who ought to know better behave this way, nobody
should wonder about the state of the industry.
Ed. Comment: In
this context, consider that that one of the discussants in the following thread
at dbForums is american, the other indian. If you ever wondered why the center
of power is shifting from the West to the East, one of the reasons is in there
somewhere, in Gates’, Stonebraker’s and r937’s utterings.
Rajiravi: I strongly agree with you that MS Access is
not a real relational database. With its emphasis on physical files, Access
confuses the physical and logical aspects of databases.
For that matter, using the same argument, MYSQL is also not a
real database either. When you can specify the format you want your table data
to be stored in, you are no longer talking about a relational database. Then,
too, is their insistence that foreign keys (or referential integrity) are not
required. This makes it abundantly clear that the designers of MYSQL wouldn't
recognize relational database theory if somebody hit them on the head with it.
r937: somebody has been visiting dbdebumph.com too
often.
access is a real relational database.
mysql is a real relational database.
please stop being so elitist
Rajiravi: Yes, I visit www.dbdebunk.com every Friday
afternoon when they have a new set of articles. And I do learn a lot from that
site.
Some of the moderators of this site seem not only to visit
the site, but also contribute to it. So, I guess I am in good company there.
I haven't bought anything from that site yet, but plan to do
so to support them and to learn from them.
Sites like Fabian Pascal's dbdebunk are sorely needed.
r937: i'm happy for you, and i'm glad that you can
stomach the arrogance and vitriol that permeates that site
however, please do not let it affect your grasp of reality
according to everybody else in the world, access and mysql
are certainly real enough, and they are indisputably relational databases
for someone to denigrate these two excellent products, used
by millions of people around the world, based only on some perceived
shortcomings as measured against theoretical and idealistic standards, only
reveals how far removed from reality the speaker is
according to those theoretical and idealistic standards,
there is no product in existence which could be called a "real relational
database"
yes, i've heard of Tutorial D, but i don't think it has
displaced too many access or mysql installations--let's revisit this subject
when it starts to get picked up by some fortune 500 (or even fortune 5000)
companies
Rajiravi: It is interesting that people see Fabian
Pascal's postings as arrogant. I, for one, do not see them as such.
He states his facts and asks others to prove their statements
when they disagree with him. Most often they can not rebut him on the technical
points of his argument.
Then the next step is to say that his ideas will not work in
"the real world." Again this statement is made without any proof. As
I've mentioned here before, I've implemented a web application built on a 3rd
normal form database with real time access to it. No performance issues at all!
The users' comment was that it was the "cleanest" application that
they had seen. (It also had zero bugs during its lifetime!) Wouldn't have been
as clean without it being a 3rd NF database. Also, this was before I had
visited Pascal's site and heard about the evils of nulls. Strangely enough, my
database design contained very few null columns. Most tables had only required
fields. A similar, but simpler project, that denormalized the database for
"performance" turned out to be much slower. (An attempt to convert it
to a Java Based application was a total failure.)
My real world experience strongly supports Fabian Pascal's
views. Hence I am very sympathetic to his ideas.
Is Mr. Pascal bitter? Yes, he is. So would anyone be who is a
master of his subject, yet sees others denigrating him merely because they do
not understand what he is saying. His comments about the sorry state of affairs
in the software world is very accurate.
Vitriol from Fabian Pascal? What a strange idea!
There is as much vitriol from others towards him, if not more.
Regarding Access and MySQL, many people consider a
spreadsheet as a database and use it as such. That does not make a spreadsheet
a relational database. Access and MySQL are databases, but not relational by
any stretch of my imagination. I would not use either if given a choice. I like
PostgreSQL though.
r937: i guess you need to stretch your imagination a
wee bit more, then. would you like me to show you specific examples on pascal's
site of colossal arrogance, vitriol, elitism, and rudeness? sorry, i won't,
because it would mean i'd have to go visit that site again, and while you can
stomach him, i cannot [Ed. Comment: Uhuh, how convenient]. however, i do have
two items bookmarked:
"There is absolutely nothing that will persuade me to
consider anything that has to do with Celko. 100% waste of time."
(http://www.dbdebunk.com/page/page/1490837.htm)
"Stay away from Celko!!!!"
(http://www.dbdebunk.com/page/page/857309.htm)
arrogant, rude, and condescending.
Rajiravi: I agree with you that Fabian Pascal could
have used gentler phrasing. In other
words, he was highly opinionated. But rude? No. Arrogant? Yes. Condescending?
Maybe.
I can tolerate arrogance from those who have something to be
arrogant about. Like John McEnroe, Michael Jordan, etc. (Not that they were
arrogant.) But the truly great people are those who are acknowledged masters,
and humble at the same time. Like Chris Date.
In this particular case, I disagree with Fabian Pascal. There
are quite a few interesting things that Joe Celko says. Does he make mistakes
from time to time? Yes. But then, I do not have to agree with Celko or Pascal
on every single topic.
There is a saying in India to the effect that: The Lotus is a
beautiful flower despite growing in very dirty water. Ignore the place that it
grows in and appreciate its beauty.
I apply that to the debunk site and ignore the arrogance that
sometimes comes across. My aim is to learn new things, and that site does do
that for me.
It's interesting that the likes of r937 are always silent
when others point blank insult me using foul language, while failing to provide
any content whatsoever, but my personal preference not to deal with Celko,
based on substantive evidence we provided over the years to back me up
(for just recent examples see There’s
Only One Relational Model, (Not) More on Celko Please!,
and On an Old Celko Puzzle),
bothers him. One reason is because he has no clue about substance—no wonder,
given his authority source for database knowledge: corporations—and therefore
can only interact with style: he is concerned with my style, but cannot
appreciate, and therefore is oblivious to, the damage that Celko causes.
To answer MW, the r937’s of the world are precisely what
Gates has in mind as examples of proper “education”.
(Incidentally, when you hear “elitism”, you know you’re dealing
with the likes of those who put Bush in power with such destructive
consequences, which they’re incapable of comprehending. And this is an educated
guess. It’s reality that’s rude, not me. I am just pointing it out).
My advice stands, Ravi: Stay away from Celko! Perhaps not
polite, but practical.
Ed. Note: Here’s the correct
perspective on Gates' notion of education.
Posted 4/29/05
