Re: Dreaming About Redesigning SQL

From: Christopher Browne <cbbrowne_at_acm.org>
Date: 27 Oct 2003 02:45:20 GMT
Message-ID: <bni0s0$10g8ah$1@ID-125932.news.uni-berlin.de>

"Anthony W. Youngman" <thewolery_at_nospam.demon.co.uk> wrote:

> In article <mhMlb.2417$9E1.18525_at_attbi_s52>, Marshall Spight
> <mspight_at_dnai.com> writes

>>Unless one has data independence, one does not have
>>this option; one will be locked into a particular
>>performance model. This is why I found the MV
>>guy's obvious pleasure at being able to precisely
>>describe the performance model for his DB as odd:
>>I thought it a deficit to be able to say what it was;
>>he thought it an asset.
>>

> When you park your car, do you put the chassis on the drive, the > engine in the garage, and the wheels in the front garden?

When I park my car, I don't particularly _care_ whether it runs on propane, diesel, gasoline, ethanol, or batteries. (Well, at home, they don't allow propane cars in the parking garage, but that's a case where details HAVE to emerge.) I don't need to care whether the car uses a 4 cylinder engine, 6, 8, 12, or perhaps evades having cylinders at all.

I frankly have NO IDEA how many RPMs the engine gets to, nor do I know how many times the wheels turn in the average minute.

These are all details I don't NEED to know in order to park the car, and are pretty much irrelevant to the average need to drive an automobile.

I consider it a Good Thing that my database has a query optimizer that makes it unnecessary for me to worry about the details of how indexes will be used.

Occasionally some anomaly comes up that requires that I dig into details, but most of the time, the abstractions allow me to ignore these details, and allows me to spend my time worrying about optimizing the things that actually need it, as opposed to chasing after irrelevant improvements.

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Received on Sun Oct 26 2003 - 20:45:20 CST