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Home -> Community -> Usenet -> c.d.o.server -> Re: What so special about PostgreSQL and other RDBMS?

Re: What so special about PostgreSQL and other RDBMS?

From: Quirk <quirk_at_syntac.net>
Date: 24 May 2004 03:18:32 -0700
Message-ID: <4e20d3f.0405240218.6eedf26e@posting.google.com>


Noons <wizofoz2k_at_yahoo.com.au.nospam> wrote in message news:<40af7768$0$3038$afc38c87_at_news.optusnet.com.au>...

> > on discussing these things in this thread, it's pretty clear to me we
> > are dealing with zealots and those looking for genuine answers have
 

> It's a pity that you have considered my reply as that of a zealot.
> I did concede a few points and debated yours in a civilized fashion.

Sorry if you thought I was refering to you specificly, rather I was lamenting about the general quality of the responses in this thread, like those of Volker, moronic zealot extraordinaire, a man so stupid, that when I suggested he didn't know what a fallacy was, he thought I was critisising his _english_ instead of his knowledge of logic and the standards of debate.

However, there is clear zealotry in your post, for example:

You said: "It's with freeware that you need a STACK of wrappers to protect you from sudden underlying code changes! Not with commercial software!"

See: no other reasoning is given why underlying code may suddenly change other than in one case it is _free_, in the other case it is _commercial_. This is not a reasoned argument, but rather the faith of a zealot.

Since neither freeness nor commercialness has a direct impact on code stability, but rather the release management practices of the development group has.

There are badly managed free software projects, and badly managed nonfree ones, your argument is therefore a fallacy, although your english, like Volker's is great!

> However, thanks for giving me the opportunity of stating this in a less
> civilized language (remember: YOU started the language, not I):

Please, use any language you like, you are quite welcome if my post has given you a greater since of liberty.

> none of
> your points is by definition a "world truth".

When I say things like "the readers can make up their own minds, as they should in any case" and "these are suggestions" (both present in the post you are responding too) what makes you think I am defining "world truths?"

> You don't provide a single
> supporting argument that does not involve your interpretation of what
> software makers would do rather than what they in fact do.

Oh please, I have provided many clear aruments throughout this thread, in my last message I even posted pseudocode, how much clearer do you want?

> Your stupid deduction that somehow only your view of the world is worthy
> the title of "developer" defines you as the idiotic and moronic type of
> geek that thinks the world was invented yesterday by your kind and all that
> came before is just amateur effort. In character, I might say.

You know nothing about my character or world view. Amateur effort is amateur effort, on it's own it is neither old nor new. None of the ideas I have suggested are particularily new. The existince of a large body of free software is fairly new, however the practice of acquiring source licences for critical dependencies is not, and serves more or less the same function. Abstraction is not new, good archiving techniques are not new. A developer who did not understand these techniques was an amateur in 1976, just as much as today.

> You and your little group can go and drop dead as this thread ends
> here for me: I don't have time to argue ANYTHING with "kewl" people.

I'm sorry the barbs you endured in your primary school still hurt you so much, perhaps therapy can help.

> Not worth the effort: the worst disasters in IT development I've ever seen
> in 30 years of career have been prompted by your kind and I don't like
> my name associated with that sort of unprofessional reputation. It
> never pays in the long run.

Let's see, I am suggestion abstracting dependencies, getting source code when you can and keeping your archives human readable.

What sort of disasters can come of this? The worst that can be said is that, if implemented poorly, these suggestions may cause performance degradation, hardly Godzilla crushing Tokyo.

However, It is quite easy to imagine disasters as a consequence of not following these suggestions; customers lost by not being able to support their database platform, production applications obsoleted by obsoleted debendencies, unusable archives and lost permenant records.

> Goodbye and keep developing for a non-existent market.
> It has a brilliant future.

Which market is that? The market for good applications? I agree that is too small and that too many firms are screwed by bad developers and protectionist suppliers, however I assure you the marker for developers who understand good, well designed, open systems is doing quite well, and growing.

> And yes, I DO have a future and nothing you can
> possibly do will stop it.

Hey, I only want to improve your future with my advise! Here, I'll give you another tip:

A "binding" is a term used to describe a native function (or method) that provides access to an external dependency.

For instance, 'MySQL', the database server, is a dependency, in PHP, the function mysql_query is called a binding. 'libcurl', the URL handling library, is a dependency, the PHP function 'curl_exec', is a binding.

An 'API' ("application programming interface") is the interface provided by the dependency itself for external access, frequently for C, the 'binding' is your platform's _native_ function or method that provides access to this API, not the API itself.

Each of these terms, 'Dependency', 'Binding' and 'API' have distinct meanings, and now, after a 30 year career, you can finaly understand them!

I hope this helps.

Regards,
Dmytri. Received on Mon May 24 2004 - 05:18:32 CDT

Original text of this message

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