Re: Pizza Example

"Bill H" <wphaskett_at_THISISMUNGEDatt.net> wrote in message news:1OYgc.731$GR.102973_at_attbi_s01...
> Dawn:
>
> > One of the categories of interest are ERP solutions for mid-size
> businesses:
> > manufacturing, higher ed; health industry; service organizations. Many
> such
> > companies invest in RDBMS solutions. I have anecdotes, not evidence,
that
> > backs up my intuition, not evidence, that the use of non-RDBMS solutions
> > (including PICK, Cache', Berkeley DB, ...) over a 10 year period is
> > significantly less expensive. I have found no surveys or experiments
that
> > shed any light on this, so if anyone knows of any ...
>
> I consulted for a large leasing company that went from a 5-7 person
non-1NF
> shop developing and maintaining their leasing application to a
Client/Server
> development model to replace the non-1NF dbms. Their staff grew to 50 and
> their consulting fees to an international "consulting" firm was in the
> neighborhood of $10 million over 2-3 years. In the end, after five years,
> they got nothing as the Client/Server development was scrapped and the
> business was eventually sold.

This is the type of exceedingly common anecdotal story that make me continue to investigate this area. In this case at least the company did not go bankrupt. There are several stories about companies who "simply" tried to move from their non-1NF "data storage system" (for the purists) to Oracle and ended up having to go out of business after watching all their dollars get sucked into the giant RDBMS hole.

There might be similar stories that favor every model, so I don't consider this evidence of anything other than that I ought to "stay on the case" until I at least have a solid hypothesis for why so many people, me included, have the impression that the relational model has not seemed to software development and maintenance efforts better (better quality, less expensive), on the whole.

Unfortuately, anything I come up with to capture more than anecdotes would be expensive to research and the research would be just as discounted as if someone set out to prove that one political party or the other made the country better while in the White House -- just too much subjectivity in any approach to collecting such data. --dawn

> I have, like Laconic2, been involved with some pretty serious problem
> resolutions in the Financial/IT part of business. I would state the
> Pick/non-1NF application/data model is "as simple as it needs to be...";
> which is a principal maxim for business/IT problem resolution.
>
> Bill
Received on Tue Apr 20 2004 - 02:01:33 CEST