From: WS
To: Fabian Pascal
More grist for your mill: On Thursday a
"trainer", Kimberly L.Tripp (Principal Mentor, Solid Quality
Learning, and Content Manager for www.SQLSkills.com and
Writer/Editor for TSQL Solutions/SQL Mag www.tsqlsolutions.com and
Internal Trainer for Microsoft Employees), started the one-day workshop by
stating that she did not care about the relational model. Dmitri went to this
one, and I attended another. Dmitri was upset since he then did not know
which of what she recommended was OK to do and which would lead to corrupt
data. One of the attendees told us that the relational model was
"just academic" and did not apply in the real world. These two
make it apparent to us that you are right about the widespread misconceptions
about the relational model. You knew this already, of course. I think that
"just academic" can be translated into "I don't understand
it."
On the positive side, the link
below gives 13 practical reasons for having normalized tables by two guys from
Teradata. It is interesting to me that most of the 13 deal with
performance and ease of use while a few deal with correct data. You may
have seen this already since you have contributed articles.
From: Fabian Pascal
To: WS
These two cases are the rule, not the exception. And for good
reason: many are considered experts and hold status in the industry because
they flout sound fundamentals. The industry does not reward, but punishes those
who insist on the fundamentals, by marginalizing them. So give me a
commercially successful pundit and I'll give you either an uneducated
practitioner, or, on rare occasions, educated ones who say what the industry
wants to hear.
"Academic" is a code word for "just theory,
and therefore, not practical". This is a more serious social problem,
beyond computers and databases: a vast majority of practitioners do not make
the distinction between "it's just a theory" and "a sound
theoretical foundation", because the education and socialization system
does not instill the difference in them. That is one of the reasons why the US
is one of the most superstitious countries in the world, up there with some of
the most primitive societies; religion is, of course, the major form of
superstition. Consequently, it’s not just that people “don't understand”, they do
not want to understand, which is much, much worse and a recipe for
disaster.
The article you refer to is further validation of the
seriousness of the problem: even when people say something right, they do it
for the wrong reasons.
Posted
03/28/03
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