RE: No to SQL? Anti-database movement gains steam

        Forgive me for chopping out your lengthily message as I'm afraid it will hit the quote limit. But a lot of what you say was also held as true of the relational movement many years ago. Back then we were staring at various hieratical systems that were very well entrenched in the IT world, IE HP's TURBO IMAGE. These all needed much customized code (HP Turbo Image intrinsics as they were called instead of SQL) to make things work and yes re-writes were a constant as well as changing the data stores which was always painful. Been there, done that, and the thought still makes me wince. But change the IT world did because SQL promised something for everyone, namely a standard way of accessing data that more people could understand, something that Cobol also promised but missed the boat.

        As for your companies decision to upgrade Notes vs. enter into one of the new CRM packages, bravo. If it ain't broke, don't "fix" it, assuming that's the direction you want to go in. We looked at ManMan's replacement product, since HP decided to desupport the HP3000 and MPE operating system. Problem was that the ManMan-X product was ugly, expensive, hard to work with meaning more training for end users, etc... PeopleSoft was a more intuitive and easier to use which lead to less training and consequently why we choose it.

        As for NON-SQL data stores, they have been around since the introduction of the punch card, and yes it did provide my wife with several years of gainful employment "key punching", but they like these new ideas needed custom code and many "refactorings" to keep up with the current technology and needs (I'd love to have a dollar for every time my wife complained about having to redo her "drum cards" because someone changed the requirements, it would cover my 401k losses). And I figure that these non-traditional data stores will continue into the distant future to fulfill some point solution.

        I think though that the bottom line these folks were really trying to make is that they want something that is fast, runs on commodity hardware, for commercial purposes, and is dirt cheap. The last point being the sticky one that none of the main stream database vendors has addresses appropriately.

Dick Goulet
Senior Oracle DBA
PAREXEL International

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