From: Alf Pedersen

To: Editor

Date: 23 Jun 2005

 

That's why it is so important to have people like yourself, Date, Darwen and others to stand against the pressure of hypes. It is also reassuring and comforting for people like myself. I just talked to a (advanced) programmer and had some fun with him about objects, based on that car case that you debunked a while ago (http://www.databasedesign-resource.com/objects-vs-relational-tables.html), which was written before you pointed to it from your site: I was so offended by that "white-paper". Then he said: "Oh, we don't do it that way: You have misunderstood the object concept: We have pointers to other classes; you don't need your mother-in-law and all the other folks to be delivered to the garage, so it's superior to RM anyway." What IS he talking about?

 

I do not know what to say many times ... There are some fundamentals out there:

 

·         What is an object?

·         What is navigation?

·         Where does navigation belong?

·         What are types(domains) and how are they implemented?

 

I recently talked to a veteran in the business, where I stated that the BLOB datatype (sic, as you put it) was Oracle's way of saying: "OK, this is complex stuff. I don't know what it is but I'll store it for you anyway. Do what you like with it; i don't care or understand.". So I told my friend, "OK, so you are storing a movie. I want to view frame #5 of that movie.". and he replied: "Oh, no, you can't ask the database. You have to use the APPLICATION that created the movie"... So much for application independence.

 

So, as you surely know for certain, many are concentrating on what is possible, without exploring the possibilities...

 

 

From: Fabian Pascal

To: Alf Petersen

 

Yes, but the point is that importance and perception of importance are not the same thing. And my concern is not about whether what I do is needed, but that people are at best unaware that it is needed, or believe it is not.

 

This is what people learn and believe, and they don't like to be told that what they know is invalid.

 

It is not required to know/understand any of this to get a job. All you need to do is learn a product. In fact, most practitioners are not even aware that there is such a thing as education, which is different and separate from training. Most use the cookbook approach, because thinking is too hard. Educational systems are giving up their function and turn into training grounds for vendors. And if you are neither taught, nor required to think, know, understand, and question, it is both hard and unrewarded, so people are neither able nor willing to do it.

 

Data independence is being thrown out the window. We're regressing back decades, to when there were no databases, only applications and files. Here's an example:

 

http://news.com.com/Rethinking+the+relational+database/2010-1015_3-5715457.html?tag=sas .email

 

It's worse than that: they don't even distinguish what's possible from what's right. They believe that what's possible is by definition right and never question it.

 

 

Posted 8/12/05