From: CP

To: Editor

Date: 20 May 2005

 

[Regarding On “Java Mafia” and DBMS Agnosticism] I understand the pain of DBA in such situation. However the DBMS-agnosticism has some reasons behind it. This buzzword was born from painful experiences of porting applications from one SQL DBMS to another one. This does happen from time to time. Sometimes even version upgrade from one vendor caused incompatibilities in DBMS-specific features. And due to SQL language problems, applications often had to use these features in order to work.

 

From that pain the developers have learned to trust DBMSs as little as possible and do as much as possible in the application code. And "DBMSs" like MySQL do not help here as they reduce trusted set of functionality even further. Thus here is the DBMS-agnosticism principle.

 

This buzzword is being passed from veterans to acolytes. And acolytes often take it as holy writing without bothering to understand why it was introduced and therefore they are fanatical about it and apply it at wrong places.

 

I think this problem might be cured only by restoring trust in developers and by waiting when developers who trust DBMSs will become respected veterans themselves to pass other buzzwords around. So not anytime soon I guess. It is much easier to loose trust than to

gain it.

 

 

From: Fabian Pascal

To: CP

 

But does not that confirm/validate precisely what we have been arguing for years: that neither vendors, nor DBAs, nor app developers, nor users know and understand fundamentals?

 

If they did, we wouldn't have had SQL and the way it was implemented, nor the problems you describe, nor the cookbook approach that you describe.

 

That was always the root of the problem and until it is solved via education, there is little that can be done.

 

Don't hold your breath.

 

 

From: CP

 

Mostly yes. However some do understand. Please do not loose hope.

 

SQL has likely helped to create economic opportunity for incompatibilities. However it could have been worse. For example network model could have stayed with some ad hoc query language like xpath.

 

I think that education would not help much until there are some products. Information that is not confirmed by experience cannot become knowledge. Cookbook approach does become working meta-knowledge because experience confirms that building a coherent logical model of DBMS is very difficult.

 

 

From: Fabian Pascal

 

The hope was lost a long time ago. What I do is only for the minority who does understand, but they wont be able to change the system. It's too far gone.

There is no bottom to the crap. Xpath and XQuery is what you're getting. Worse, they're dropping databases altogether. See my forthcoming debunking of Jim Gray’s article at dbazine.com.

It's a vicious cycle. To build the right products they need the right education and educated users to demand it.

Lost cause.

 

 

Posted 7/22/05