Re: Is supertyping orthadox?

On 22 Mar 2001 02:56:44 GMT, Todd Gillespie <toddg_at_linux127.ma.utexas.edu> wrote:
>I am glad to see that we share loathing for middle-tier designs (and PHBs
>who count 4-tiers as 3-tiers).

I'm not sure I loath 3+ tier designs, they have their place, but mostly they have very high costs which are usually ignored in a childish enthusiasm for technology.

Hey, I had a 9.5-tier system at my last gig -- rich client, database, web client, asp, replication (that's my half!), couple of autonomous agent programs. Fun and games!

>But I was asking for a detailed criticism of their product, rather than
>personal assaults on their skills.

I guess some fixed but small percentage of applications developers eventually learn that one *can* stuff an entire database into a couple of meta-tables. Not sure what there is to say beyond that, except that it's seldom a good idea to actually do so!

It's a common attribute of developers to want to use every feature in sight. It's another common attribute of developers to think that minimal lines of code (or tables) is a better design. Both are probably more common yet in
not-quite-newbies-but-havent-really-got-a-grip-yet-or-ever developers, in my experience.

>Yes, it is obvious that they have
>either a poor grasp of relational theory or that they are directly
>assaulting the tenets of it. But proving that 'they have never heard of
>design' might be somewhat difficult, and does not advance the discussion
>at hand.

It's not an insult. Most such people will tell you proudly they don't do that stuff, they be PROGRAMMERS! Or, in the case of these bozos, they probably have the title SYSTEM ARCHITECT tatooed on their foreheads. Sorry, I've seen this too often to be diplomatic about such people as third parties, tho if they were participating in the discussion I suppose I'd tone it down. A little. Maybe.

> Moreover, a suggestion that they move their work into flat files
>strikes me as fatalistic, to say the least.

If indeed they are loading it all into a middle tier at app startup, it's not fatalistic, it's just good advice.

>There are a lot of people coming into the relational world from several
>directions, OO amongst them, and the interfaces between the relational
>world and the one these people have worked in is still up in the air.
>Maybe we can illustrate some of them in the future.

People who claim to have some expertise in OO without first getting a good grounding in relational, are the most dangerous -- and most common. Something about those who do not study history being condemned to repeat it.

Your point about the interface between the two still being up in the air is a good one, however. I'm sure that was a large part of their thinking. OTOH, I wouldn't think to give a tutorial on it in the newsgroup. And, given a good handle on relational database theory and practice, I think that a good OO developer will make better decisions without a lot of handholding.

Not that I'm holding my breath on this, the trend seems to be the other way. Eventually, we'll get SQL3 ANSI object-relational features done right in the major database products, I'm surprised it's been such slow going, but I guess it's a big change and it takes time and time and time.

Joshua Stern
JRStern_at_gte.net Received on Thu Mar 22 2001 - 15:57:33 CET