"The educated person is not the person who can answer the questions, but the person who can question the answers" --T. Schick Jr.

 

"We as humans have an instinct for creativity and a moral instinct. A good educational system ought to nurture and encourage these aspects of human life and allow them to flourish. But of course that has problems. For one thing, it means that you will encourage challenge of authority and domination. It will encourage questioning of powerful institutions. So the way schools actually function, by and large, there's a very strong tendency that works its way out in the long run and on average, for the schools to have a kind of filtering effect. They filter out independence of thought, creativity, imagination, and in their place foster obedience and subordination." --Noam Chomsky

 

In an exchange with a product marketing manager trying to sell me on the advantages of his "information-centric" XML DBMS which "does not require database design", I called such a claim exactly what it is: nonsense. And when he said, "let the market decide that", I assured him that the basis for my argument was not any product or market, but data fundamentals. Shortly following the posting of that exchange, I received a long reaction from a reader, which ended as follows:

 

"OK, I know ... your "arguments have nothing to do with market and products. They have to do with data and knowledge. That won't be decided by the market, because the market is ignorant." I guess this comes back to my first question: markets may be ignorant, but presumably even ignorant people will seize upon techniques that really give them a leg up on the competition. And since most people in the IT industry presumably learned at least the basics of the relational model in school, it's hard to totally blame "ignorance" here. Isn't it just remotely possible that there may be something to this XML stuff that could be useful even for knowledgeable RDBMS practitioners, and that it's practical value, rather than ignorance and marketing is behind its recent popularity?"

 

Now, this is one of the most common arguments against the heresy that the "market" does not necessarily produce the best, most meritorious, or even most practical outcomes. This site provides ample irrefutable evidence that, at least insofar as the IT industry is concerned, this position does not hold water. Nevertheless, the belief in markets is so religious, that even when the evidence is incontrovertible believers, in a form of denial, refuse to accept it. It would be a good idea, therefore, to respond not with just another editorial--the first one is quite sufficient--but rather by subjecting industry behavior to some piercing analytical insight by minds much, much more substantial than mine.

Embedded in the reader's argument are several fallacious propositions.

 

"… markets may be ignorant, but presumably even ignorant people will seize upon techniques that really give them a leg up on the competition."

 

Note, first, that there is a contradiction in terms here: if people seized upon that, they -- and, therefore, the market--would not remain ignorant for long, would they? Such internal contradictions are instructive of how powerful the market dogma, and how effective the social indoctrination that produces it, are.

 

"In a world torn by every kind of fundamentalism -- religious, ethnic, nationalist and tribal -- we must grant first place to economic fundamentalism, with its religious conviction that the market, left to its own devices, is capable of resolving all our problems. This faith has its own ayatollahs. Its church is neo-liberalism; its creed is profit; its prayers are for monopolies." --Carlos Fuentes

 

"Markets are political institutions in the broadest sense--they're about organizing ownership and control. Through the bond markets, a small number of investors control public policy, and through the stock markets, the same small group exercises control over corporate policy. One might conclude wrongly that you can separate 'virtuous production' out of all this. But you can't." --Anonymous

 

That the reader refers to techniques is instructive: it's precisely the exclusive focus on techniques that underlie market ignorance. At issue are fundamental concepts and principles, not techniques. They are dismissed as "theory" and, thus, supposedly, not as practical as techniques. Underlying this argument is an erroneous notion of theory as "anything 'generic' that is not product-specific" (see below).

 

"Those who are enamored of practice without theory are like a pilot who goes into a ship without rudder or compass and never has any certainty where he [sic] is going. Practice should always be based upon a sound knowledge of theory." --Leonardo da Vinci

 

For people to seize upon anything--in this case, data fundamentals--they must (a) be exposed to it (b) get a correct and complete explanation of it and its implications, and (c) be able to take concrete advantage of it (which, in the database context, means that there is a true, correct and complete implementation). None of this holds true in the IT industry.

 

(a)   As I demonstrated in the first editorial, it is practically impossible to speak about fundamentals at any industry event, or write about them in any trade publication. Rejections are usually couched in code language, which obscures the true underlying reasons, often subconsciously.

 

"Debunking database myths may be good, but the IDUG SJ is looking for articles that provide tips and techniques for use in their jobs." --IDUG Solutions Journal

 

"Our criterion for selecting abstracts was first people with case studies of business rules projects within corporations and government. We received many of these types of abstracts. Then names that are well known within the business rules community and our attendees almost expect to see on the program were selected." --Business Rules Forum

 

"We normally hold university sessions open for those people who have received high marks at past IOUG-A conferences." --Oracle University [Note: there is not one person among them who covers fundamentals]

 

(b)   On the rare occasions where fundamentals are raised, they are almost always misunderstood and/or distorted, often bordering on the absurd.

 

"A traditional normalized structure cannot and will not outperform a denormalized star schema, from a DSS perspective. These schemas are designed for speed, not your typical record style transaction. I have seen and been involved in too many large RDBM implementations that can absolutely not support the stress that a denormalized structure can handle. Supporting users increasing needs of accessing and analyzing information from a normalized schema perspective does not make sense. Normalized models cannot support ad-hoc users needs to extract large volumes of records, aggregating the facts and create hierarchies on the fly. This type of requests puts way to much stress on a model that was originally developed to support the handling of single record transactions. " --Practitioner with 20 years experience

 

"The most visible limitation of the relational model has been its inability to handle multimedia files, but the importance of this has been overstated. In fact, the relational model has some far more significant limitations that have not yet been challenged:

 

·Every new relational application needs a new set of programs developed from scratch, which is labor-intensive, expensive and wasteful;

·Relational applications cannot be readily tailored to the needs of large numbers of individual users, which is an issue for ASPs;

·Relational applications cannot record a piece of information about an individual thing that is not relevant to every other thing of the same type. This limits our ability to continually improve customer service levels;

 

Information about identical things in the real world is structured differently in every relational database, so it is difficult and expensive to amalgamate two databases." –Simon Williams

 

"The only rules that should reside in a database are referential integrity. (and sometimes that isn't really necessary) It is also best to keep rules out of your data access code. (hard-coding WHERE values.) Business rules should be centralized in Java business objects for better manageability, scalability, etc. Don't let pushy DBAs tell you otherwise. Rules in a database slow down development as well as data access time." --www.theserverside.com/discussion/

 

(c)   A correct and complete truly relational DBMS has not been implemented. The closest the industry has come to it is SQL, which most practitioner confuse with relational and which ignores and/or violates so many fundamental concepts and principles (amply documented by Codd himself, Chris Date, Hugh Darwen, David McGoveran, myself and others), that it utterly fails to produce most of the practical benefits that adherence to them would have yielded. This, aside from SQL's additional deficiencies as a language, as well as those added by its commercially implemented dialects (see my PRACTICAL ISSUES IN DATABASE MANAGEMENT). To preempt another fallacy due to market dogma--"if a RDBMS is better and possible, why hasn't any vendor implemented one?"--as I already alluded on several occasions, somebody has recently found a way to implement a truly relational DBMS that is demonstrably better than current products and feasible. Whether it'll be exploited by the industry is another matter altogether; vendors make it quite clear that they neither know/understand, nor care much for fundamentals, and they have vested interests in their own technologies.

 

 

"Well, it's really a judgment call and I think a lot of experience comes into it. It's a little bit like building a shack. Say you want to build a skyscraper, and you started out building a shack and you just keep trying to add onto it. After a while you have this severe structural problem ... So there is a fallacy to the build-upon-a-simple structure approach. Sometimes you get up to three stories and you have to do some major structural changes, and I just accept that." --dBase designer

 

" ... I think I have a crude understanding of ... "what [data] types are and what their function in a data model is". Suneido DBMS does not implement these concepts, nor does it make any claims to ... like its language, is dynamically typed i.e. database columns (fields) do not have fixed types - they can hold any type of value." –Suneido designer

 

"The FOREIGN KEY syntax in MySQL exists only for compatibility with other SQL vendors' CREATE TABLE commands; it doesn't do anything. The FOREIGN KEY syntax without ON DELETE ... is mostly used for documentation purposes. Some ODBC applications may use this to produce automatic WHERE clauses, but this is usually easy to override. FOREIGN KEY is sometimes used as a constraint check, but this check is unnecessary in practice if rows are inserted into the tables in the right order. MySQL only supports these clauses because some applications require them to exist (regardless of whether or not they work). In MySQL, you can work around the problem of ON DELETE ... not being implemented by adding the appropriate DELETE statement to an application when you delete records from a table that has a foreign key. In practice this is as quick (in some cases quicker) and much more portable than using foreign keys."

--MySQL designer

 

"most people in the IT industry presumably learned at least the basics of the relational model in school, it's hard to totally blame "ignorance" here"

 

First, a vast majority of practitioners do not go through a formal education program, they are self-taught, usually by just learning a product. Or not even that: witness the many weekly quotes showing the "cookbook approach" in full swing.

 

Q: I have no IT experience, am changing jobs after 20 years, which certification should I take for DBA and will the certification without experience be accepted by workplace? Thanks.

 

A: ... First, you need to decide among the top systems: Oracle, DB2, SQL Server, Informix, Sybase, etc. Then you'll need to take a training course (thousands of dollars) or read a hell of a lot of books. The cheapest way to proceed is to download, for example, Oracle 8i from the technet.oracle.com site, install it, then start playing with it. Read the reams of free Oracle info on the web, and get your hands dirty. That's the best way to determine if this career is right for you! Good luck.

–Newsgroup exchange

 

Second, not only are business and technical courses focused almost exclusively on products, but even on those rare occasions when they do tackle fundamentals, those who teach do not know and understand them any better than their students.

 

"I have been trying to find the correct way of normalizing tables in Access. From what I understand, it goes from the 1st normal form, to 2nd, then 3rd. Usually, that's as far as it goes, but sometimes to the 5th and 6th. Then, there's also the Cobb 3rd. This all makes sense to me. I am supposed to teach a class in this starting next week, and I just got the textbook. It says something entirely different. It says 2nd normal form is only for tables with a multiple-field primary key. 3rd normal form is only for tables with a single-field key. 4th normal form can go from 1st to 4th, where there are no independent one-to-many relationships between primary key and non-key fields." Can someone clear this up for me please?" --Online question

 

Third, there is an increasing reliance on vendors for information who, as I just showed, are not knowledgeable about basics themselves, and who have a different agenda to boot.

 

"My first impression is that the [seminar] topics (and the expected level of technical depth) covered in these presentations is not likely to be what our members are used to. We are predominantly Sybase-DBA-centric, with over 90% of our members falling into this category. Also, over the past few years we have focused even more on detailed technical presentations - often given by Sybase engineers themselves and the [seminar material] looks quite generic." --Sybase user group

 

Fourth, the notion that data fundamentals are taught in school is increasingly inaccurate. As I argued in the first editorial, academic institutions are increasingly becoming vocational training grounds for vendors, substituting product training for database education.

 

"We are very interested in additional Oracle instructors..." --Academic institution

 

"Does [the course] cover accessing a database via CGI? i.e. VB, Java, Perl, C++ access to SQL Server or Access DB? We're a computer science department, so not so interested in the user-developer side of things." --Academic institution

 

"... the truth is--all faculty must provide their own funding for now. It's not going to be the same in the future -- but for now the reality is that we have to pay for our new buildings, labs, etc within a few years. Therefore -- grants is our only way to survive. It is sad because it doesn't give us a chance to do any fundamental research unless it is externally funded." --Academic technology research institute

 

In fact, it's much worse than that.

 

"High school business teacher Shirley Williams Cash is one of more than 150 teachers signed up to become instructors for Oracle's Internet Academy, which offers teacher training in basic Oracle technologies. She's just completed two weeks of intensive training on SQL and Java at Oracle headquarters in Redwood Shores, Calif. Now, Cash can teach database and Internet courses to her students at Osbourn High School in Manassas, VA. Because they live near major offices of America Online, Lockheed Martin, and Oracle, her students want careers in IT. "This gives them valuable skills to build upon," she says." --InformationWeek

 

"Society attacks early, when the individual is helpless." --B. F. Skinner

 

Attempts to discuss fundamentals, or to suggest education -- as distinct from product-specific training -- can be hazardous to one's career and wealth. Not only are such efforts not rewarded, but more often than not they are actually punished.

 

"Unfortunately, I am regarded as sort of quirky, with a "distracting" interest in the "theoretical" side of things. Now, I don't fool myself by thinking I have any mastery of things relational -- although I have an engineering background, I am self taught in the relational model from reading things like your UNDERSTANDING RELATIONAL DATABASES book and some of Date's text and writings. I do realize the immensity of what I don't know. But what's really frustrating is that many of the folks I must persuade don't even know what they don't know. They don't really distinguish between coding and database theory/design (sort of "if you can drive the Microsoft Access user interface, you're a database designer" kind of mentality.) This situation means I can expect few champions to go to bat advocating generic database seminars, yet this is precisely what we need." --DG

 

"There are people who don't accept, who aren't obedient. They are weeded out, they're "behavior problems". The long-term effect of this is to reward and foster subordination; it begins in kindergarten and goes all the way through your professional or other career. If you challenge authority, you get in one or another kind of trouble. It's not 100 percent the case, and there are some areas of life where it's dramatically not the case, but on average and overwhelmingly in the outcomes, it holds."

 

"If something comes along that you don't like, there are a few sort of four-letter words that you can use to push it out of the sphere of discussion. If you were in a bar downtown, they might have different words, but if you're an educated person what you use are complicated words like "conspiracy theory" or "Marxist”. It's a way of pushing unpleasant questions off the agenda, so that we can continue in our own happy ideology."

--Noam Chomsky

 

In the IT world, the equivalents to "conspiracy theory" and "Marxist" are "generic" or "theoretical", but the principle is the same. The above consequences are nothing but logical implications of the specific way in which the social system is constructed and operates.

 

"The end of democracy, and the defeat of the American Revolution will occur when government falls into the hands of the lending institutions and moneyed incorporations."

--Thomas Jefferson

 

So it is with education: it ends when it falls into the hands of moneyed incorporations. It becomes training at best or, to put a stop to independent, critical thinking, indoctrination at worst.

 

 

Posted 09/08/01

 

 

 

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