One Ring to Bind Them

From: Laconic2 <laconic2_at_comcast.net>
Date: Mon, 14 Jun 2004 12:54:44 -0400
Message-ID: <c9GdnW9YiKJkSlDd4p2dnA_at_comcast.com>


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

"Eric Kaun" <ekaun_at_yahoo.com> wrote in message news:wekzc.25516$Dh6.9215_at_newssvr31.news.prodigy.com...

> This is, more than anything, the philosophical divide between relational
and
> Pick folks. The more rules, the more they should be kept OUT of the
> application code. "Application" means just that: a judicious application.
Of
> what? Rules. Application != definition, just as implementation !=
> specification.

It isn't just the Pick folks. The OO folks also feel that the business rules belong encapsulated inside the objects that "really know what's going on", as opposed to formalized as metadata and shared the same way data is shared.

In the days when databases were being spread to the old COBOL and files gang, this divide was called the difference between "process centric" and "data centric" views of the world. I think it's really the same divide, over and over again.

It even happens within the RDBMS vendors. I've been watching SQL gradually evolve from a bad answer to the requirement for a "universal data sublanguange" into a bad programming language, in its own right. Received on Mon Jun 14 2004 - 18:54:44 CEST

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