Re: In an RDBMS, what does "Data" mean?

"Alfredo Novoa" <alfredo_at_ncs.es> wrote in message news:40bb7caf.2943492_at_news.wanadoo.es...
> On Mon, 31 May 2004 12:51:54 -0300, Leandro Guimaraens Faria Corsetti
> Dutra <leandro_at_dutra.fastmail.fm> wrote:
>
> > Faith originally was not opposed to reason
>
> Indeed, it was a "solution" used when the reason had no answers. Faith
> is related to magic and authority.
>
> Fortunately the reason has a lot more answers that it had in the
> prehistory.
>
> >One has faith not necessarily because one accepts another's authority,
> >but because one continues to believe something even without presently
> >seeing proof of it.
>
> No, proofs are not the only reasons. You are confusing faith with
> deduction based on incomplete information.
>
> Although like many other words, faith has many meanings like fidelity
> (faithful implementation) and it is even used for reason based
> confidence. But I don't think we are talking about these lose uses of
> the term.
>
> The pickies use the term in order to equate The Relational Model and
> the primitie approaches. Here is their fallacy:
>
> Irrationalism is faith, rationalism is faith so irrationalism is as
> good as rationalism therefore The Relational Model is not better than
> any primitive ad hoc approach.

I was with you until you seem to have jumped on some irrationalism bandwagon with that last paragraph. Given that my heavy programming years were not spent with PICK, I'm not a real pickie (and I also don't know if they call themselves that -- I have used that term as short-hand, but I'm not sure who else might). But I'll classify myself a pickie, if I may, because I see that the implementations based on the Nelson-PICK efforts (which appear to be based on the Postley-Buettell work) provide very cost-effective solutions for business, especially when compared to those claiming to be based on the relational model.

I have worked with a number of different environments, and my opinion from experience is that PICK provides a big bang for the buck and runs "lean and mean" compared to other solutions. I do not claim that I can prove it is better in any way -- it seems better. Intuition is not irrational -- it is based on our brains working in such a way as to arrive at a hypothesis (not proof!) that we might be incapable of defending through any logic, at least at some point in time.

This is NOT irrational thinking. Agreed?

 --dawn

<snip> Received on Mon May 31 2004 - 21:35:51 CEST