Chris Date once published an article at the old DBDebunk titled “Models, Models, Everywhere, Nor Any Time to Think”. If you want to get a hold of what he meant then, you oughta do a search on the title now and see what you get.
The continuous proliferation of models is an indication and measure of the disregard, if not outright hostility of the industry to sound theoretical foundations. It keeps reminding me of a decades-old piece I posted in response to David Hay's critique of Ron Ross's then proposal of a “fact model” (yet another one) as an alternative to data model. It is more relevant than ever, which is why I decided to bring it up to date. The problem is so entrenched and widespread, that even those who try to address it fail to realize that they are victims of it too.
Hay correctly observed:
“In our industry, there is a strong desire to put names on things. This is natural enough, given the amount of information that we have to classify and deal with in our work. To give something a name is to gain control over it, and this is not necessarily a bad thing. The problem is when the name takes the place of true understanding of the thing named. Discourse tends to be the bantering of names, without true understanding of the concepts involved.”
In this industry, many of the names are just re-labeling, whether it fits or not. Here are a couple of exquisite examples of both cases:
“I was amused to read in [Ralph Kimball's] article that my own suppliers and parts database design was "a perfect, beautiful star schema!" When I first learned the term "star schema", my reaction was that a properly designed star schema would be nothing neither more, nor less than a properly designed schema per se (in other words, one that did obey those scientific principles of relational design that do exist). So to see RK say that my schema was in fact a star schema reminded me (I’m afraid) of Peter Chen’s original E/R paper, in which—among other things—he reinvented the concept of domains, but called them value sets, and then went on to analyze the relational model in terms of his own ideas and said “Look, domains are just value sets!” --C. J. Date
Note: Kimball's "star schema" is, of course, not a relational schema, but quite an attempt to avoid it, due to failure to distinguish application views of the database from the database schema.
