It so happens that I just got the following two messages on
the same day. I will leave it to the reader to figure out which reflects either
of two aspects in the title.
From: RB
Subject: Thank You
Date: 28 Jul 2005
I just found out about this website and started reading
it. I found it to be informative and
decided to get Fabian’s Pascal's book PRACTICAL ISSUES IN DATABASE
MANAGEMENT (I hope this is a good starter).
As a modest database practitioner trying to make a living, I
always intuitively felt there was something wrong with SQL implementation and
had countless endless arguments with developers and dba’s about why design is
so important for the DBMS cycle not to become a nightmare.
Thanks to you, I realized now that all these arguments were
mainly waste of time as I had the arrogance to try to educate people while not
being educated enough myself. Being
from a math and computer science academic background, my only effective db
reading was Codd’s rules + some disparate writings of his (multi
programming). The rest was drawn from
logical “as objective as possible” extrapolation of these readings but that was
deeply insufficient I realize now.
Better late than ever, I vow to be more knowledgeable of this
field b4 going any further. As a token
of my gratitude for being a rare beacon voice of sense in an environment
governed mainly by subjective flawed perceptions, I thought I would provide you
with a quote I found on a board I participate in Experts Exchange.
The source is a programmer that has been at
dba since 1978. I thought, you might like it:
It is perfectly valid to design a database without PKs on some
or all of the tables. Separate indexes
will speed up searches and provide means to refer from one table to another.
--Dan Rollins,
experts-exchange.com/databases/Microsoft SQL Server
Thank you for what you're doing. We need people like you.
Please don't give up.
From: Fabian Pascal
Good for you. It is good to know that the site is achieving,
at least once in a blue moon, the precise objective for which it was created.
But you will find that the more you know, the less those around you will.
From: Tony Douglas
Subject: We're Doomed
Date: 28 Jul 2005
From the infamous Dawn Wolthuis (comp.databases.theory)
From August 2005 wired
(sometime in the near future) a callout in the article We Are the Web by
Kevin Kelly reads, "A simple link, it turns out, is the most powerful
invention of the decade."
The RM turned our
former foreign key navigating links into set processing joins so that instead
of navigating from one "page" to another, we join, restrict and
project.
I, for one, am pleased
that links have been "invented" and we are permitted to drive around
through data again. I don't need to do
it all the time, typically when I have a particular instance--person, place,
thing or event -- and want to know more about it.
Sure, if I know where I'm headed I could do that with set
processing, but I appreciate the permission to wander too.
Smiles.
There is something in the psyche of programmers which rejects
simplicity and positively seeks unnecessary complexity. Particular examples of
this hi-tech gadget freak mentality include object oriented programming, XML,
pointer twiddling in C, navigation in hierarchical databases. Anything which
stops a programmer getting his or her hands dirty in pointless error prone
activities is suspicious and should be prevented, on grounds of
"efficiency" or other similarly spurious "reasons". The
question is, is that in the nature of people who are drawn to programming, or
is it ingrained into them when they "learn" programming from
whichever source, or a combination of the two ?
From: Fabian Pascal
(See also Dawn
Wolthuis “Proof” )
Believe you me, data management is not the most critical
consequence of ignorance and stupidity. These two have been dooming human
societies from the inception of the very first one, and there is no reason to
believe this will change any time soon. In fact, we're witnessing the end of
the west/US as we speak, for this very reason.
I am on public record stating that there is an economic
incentive for complexity in the industry. Simplicity does not necessitate as
many consultants, books, seminars, and punditry as complexity does.
From: Tony Douglas
Indeed. You don't need curiosity, awareness or knowledge to
work in a call centre or leisure centre or mall or gym, and your country has
abandoned all pretence at a manufacturing economy. Heaven help you if that's
what your "economic miracle" is based on.
But what comes first - the economic imperative, or a
personality trait that demands complexity and revels in the bronco-busting
approach to IT ? Do they feed each other ?
I have been thinking for a while of trying to put together a
presentation or note along the lines of "Against the Cult of
Programming". A while ago I half-jokingly drew a parallel between
joining a cult and becoming a programmer, but the longer I went on the more
similar they seemed...
From: Fabian Pascal
Those who believe capitalism won are in for a shock.
Capitalism, part. the corporate welfare flavor, if left unchecked, will self
destruct. Why do you think communism (which also self-destructs if unchecked)
ever arose in East-Europe? It was a response to the failures thereof. There's a
cycle going on, they defeat each other the masses pay for it. Here's evidence:
When we consider the [Islamic] movements that embrace
violence, we can see that they are not expressions of an outburst in the West
of the [Israeli-Palestinian] conflict in the Middle East. Most of the young
Muslims radicalize in the West: They are "born-again Muslims." It's
here that they are Islamicized. Almost all separate from their families and
many have marriages with non-Muslims. Their dispute with the world isn't
imported from the Middle East: It is truly modern,
aimed against American imperialism, capitalism, etc. In other words, they
occupy the same space that the proletarian left had thirty years ago, that
Action Directe had twenty years ago ... They
exist in a militant reality abandoned by the extreme left, where the young live
only to destroy the system ... [This radicalization] isn't at all the
consequence of a "clash of civilizations," that is to say, the
importation of intellectual frameworks coming from the Middle East. This
militant evolution is happening, in situ, on our territory. It partakes
henceforth of the internal history of the West.
--Olivier Roy, quoted in Jihad Made in Europe, The
Weekly Standard
First come abandonment of knowledge and reason due to unchecked system, via
destruction of the educational system. That leads to concentration of power and
some form of fascism, either of the left, right, or above.
Anything that's based on mechanics rather than
thinking/understanding is a sort of cult. And if the system rewards it...
Posted 8/5/05
