Re: Date is Incomplete - database application software and database theory

"John Jacob" <jingleheimerschmitt_at_hotmail.com> wrote in message news:72f08f6c.0405132114.34951ab9_at_posting.google.com...
> > My reading of Date allows me to assert his detailed
> > coverage of the theoretical ground of database
> > systems technology lacks any meaningful discussion
> > of the (one would implicity assume exists) application
> > system software which is to "inhabit" the system.
>
> You're reading of Date is not very extensive. He is one of the few in
> the field who routinely *applies* the theory to actual applications.
> Indeed, his self-proclaimed mantra is 'Theory IS Practical'. For
> what? Applications!

What you might are terming applications! I would call simply examples. His treatise(s) is limited to demonstrating with sample applications, how a database might "work".

His work contains many examples of some of the basic componentry of applications, but in no way are they ever related to the diagramatic references that his work refers to as the "application layer".

His examples are didactic instruments, and effective for teaching the rudiments of db theory however they in no manner, way, shape or form are equivalent to the dynamic set of all such components which form the application software suite, which can be taken as generic!

>At the very least you should read What Not How.
>
> > This is radical incompleteness of theory.
>
> There is no formal basis for the development of applications.

I disagree. History and technology would have it that the emergence of addressable stored procedure language within the database theoretical environment permits these objects to be classified as application components.

There is sufficient formal basis in these objects to advance a simple model based on a user menu of options (all of which resolve to stored procedures), such an arrangment sufficing as an extendable suite of components, ie: an application developed.

> It is
> still very much an art, and unless and until you can show otherwise,
> you have no basis for making this claim.

Art, being a complete discipline, lives and breathes and evolves.

OTOH, both Date (Database Systems) and all the et als who follow him, are looking at a static picture for at least the last 20 years.

IMO the missing dynamic thread in database theory is the relationship of the database to its application, and vice verse. Date covers this is a diagram or two.

Pete Brown
Falls Creek
Oz Received on Fri May 14 2004 - 10:07:06 CEST