Re: Wishing trolls away

"Dawn M. Wolthuis" <dwolt_at_tincat-group.com> wrote in message news:<c7rio3$vd0$1_at_news.netins.net>...
> "Leandro Guimarães Faria Corsetti Dutra" <leandro_at_dutra.fastmail.fm> wrote
> in message news:pan.2004.05.11.21.37.13.680915_at_dutra.fastmail.fm...
> > I am sorely disappointed, the group has reverted to a trolling
> > field by sellers of sad OO, MV, XML, whatever snake oil who have no
> > interest in learning anything sane.
> >
> > I guess there comes a point where only *moderated* mailing
> > lists can bear intelligent conversation.
>
> Sorry to disappoint, if I am among your targets for this posting. I am
> truely, honestly, searching for why my book-knowledge and experience are so
> out of alignment in the area of databases, so I am guilty of bringing
> experience into the mix.

I think the key question here is how well the DB and programming environment are integrated, and in most cases the integration of SQL-products and typically used programming languages is not very good. It means that you have to somehow bridge the gap between two environments and maybe even have separate persons working on the different tiers, with more need for communication, training etc.

Integrated environments have always been popular, witness the success of MS/Access. I think also products such as Progress have a loyal following (not to mention Pick and MV!). And also the fact that OO-people have spent lot's of effort on trying to "persist" their objects in an OODBMS, instead of having to save them in a normalised SQL-database, speaks for the desire of an integrated environment.

Taking the position that the RM as a datamodel (or data meta-model) is desirable, what are the alternatives?

• use SQL-DBMSes inspite of missing integration
• use products where integrated environment is built ontop of SQL-DBMS for an example see http://publib-b.boulder.ibm.com/Redbooks.nsf/RedbookAbstracts/sg246510.html?Open
• use products built from scratch that integrate RM and application development envoronment, such as Dataphor

Apart from the problems with integration, would it even possible to build large enterprise scale applications without using an SQL-DMBS? Would it be possible to, say, write the applications that run Amazon, eBay or FedEx using PICK?

And on the reporting side, I think products such as Business Objects and Cognos Impromptu provide excellent (integrated) capabilities and that is where the RM (and even SQL!) really shine.

regards,
Lauri Pietarinen Received on Thu May 13 2004 - 06:02:39 CEST