Re: OO's best feature survey results

On Wed, 5 Nov 2003 15:44:35 +0000 (UTC), "Roy Hann" <rhann_at_globalnet.co.uk> wrote:
>> For years I've watched for a class, "Relational theory for idiots",
>> that would walk a class through Codd's original work, hopefully with
>> some modern perspective. Never seem to find it, just "Oracle for
>> idiots", etc, which is *not* the same thing.
>
>You will be saddened to hear that the "Relational Theory" chapter in our DBA
>course is invariably voted the Least Useful in the course evaluations we do.
>(I don't think it is voted Least Useful because it is too short
>either--which it certainly is! :-)

I'm sure the chapter on backup and recovery is far more useful -- seriously! Theory is a different kettle of fish. And that's without even knowing about your DBA course, whether it's aimed at, y'know, DBA's, or at developers. I mean, a theory of Turing Machines isn't going to enrich a class on C#, either!

>I am slightly curious to know what you mean by a "modern perspective"
>though. I sense you mean something more than including the many
>developments to the theory since Codd's original 1969 paper.

Well, I can't even say, really, but look at CJDate's big book An Introduction To Database Systems, and basically the last half of the book is either Further Topics or Object/Relational, and a seriously theoretical view of some of those, might be appropriate.

Joshua Stern Received on Wed Nov 05 2003 - 17:16:33 CET