From: Douglas Hawthorne
Date: 21 Mar 2006
The IEEE Computer Society recently introduced IEEE ReadyNotes
which "...are guidebooks and tutorials that serve as a quick-start
reference for busy computing professionals....".
This sounded like a cookbook approach to computing.
One of these ReadyNotes was by Michael Blaha for Designing
and Implementing Softcoded Values.
When I read the sentence, "This ReadyNote presents softcoded
values, a generic mechanism that you can use for defining and storing data at
runtime.", I immediately thought of EAV. This suspicion was confirmed in
the sample page from the ReadyNote
Some attributes have a critical effect on queries and if you
hardcode them you can improve performance. In particular, you can build
database indexes for hardcoded values which can improve performance by as much
as a few orders of magnitude. *Softcoding is not amenable to database indexes
because values from different objects and attributes are mixed together.*
Softcoding can be desirable when there are multiple values for an
object-attribute combination. Relational database tables are flat, and
hardcoding consequentially limits an object-attribute combination to at most
one value.
Blaha and Smith (2003) made the following comments about this
design pattern:
Because a database alone cannot reasonably and efficiently
enforce these constraints, the application code must do so ... With the
exception of the generalization structure, our implementations of the
softcoded-values pattern have demonstrated that it works well in practice. The
applications are flexible and the performance is only moderately
slower-approximately 20 percent- than with direct access to data. This pattern
for handling softcoded values permits changes to types of objects, their
fields, and their taxonomy, all at runtime." (p.34)
--Blaha, M., and Smith, C., A pattern for softcoded
values, _Computer_, Vol. 35, No. 5,
May 2002, pp.28-34.
What makes this even worse is that Dr. M. Blaha
"...serves on Computer's Editorial Board as area editor for databases and
software." So not only is he
promoting EAV as a database design in professional magazines and through a
professional society, he is evaluating other contributors for their expertise
and relevance.
In the end, I saved myself $19. This proves that your papers are of far
greater value at half the price.
From: Fabian Pascal
No surprise there. The database industry has been taken over
by vociferous ignoramuses who are selling crappola to other ignoramuses and
everybody's happy because ignorance is bliss. Expect this to become even worse;
there is no bottom.
This is a consequence of the total collapse of the educational
system, and hardly the most critical one[; just look at the state and path of
the country]. The dismissal of knowledge and reason is dooming western society
in general and the american empire in particular, with the barbarians at the
gates.
Posted 5/19/06
© Fabian Pascal 2000-2006 All Rights Reserved
