Re: Dr. Brown asserts databases are dead, dead as a dodo [was Re: First Impressions on Using Alphora's Dataphor]

"D Guntermann" <guntermann_at_hotmail.com> wrote in message news:<I3EC9r.G28_at_news.boeing.com>...

> > First, I ain't a Dr. And second, I'm not sure I respect my own knowledge
> > and opinions, so I'm wary when someone else says they do.
> >
> Well....what can I say? Sorry to hear that.

Are you german?

There are funny stories about misunderstandings due to the false modesty of some anglo-saxons and the literal interpretations of some germans :)

> This is a theory usenet group. Though some might disagree,

I don't.

 the truly
> revolutionary theory came from the likes of Babbage, Turing, von Nuemann,
> Claude Shannon, E. Codd, and others. I haven't seen the same degree of
> clarity and depth in theory recently at all.

By very far.

The quality of computer science is in clear decadence.

> In fact, it seems that most
> researchers make the mistake of coupling theory with technology products and
> implementations, or they scurry in group fashion to "research" and add
> incremental knowledge to another's maybe decent idea.

And there is a lot of fashion "research" on obsolete or stupid ideas.

> "endured"? These "architectures" and "systems" you describe are natural
> consequences of incremental and evolutionary advances in hardware production
> technologies. Processing power, disk, memory, and interconnect technologies
> have all become faster and cheaper. There is no theory behind that.

The theory behind that is the old Von Neuman's architecture.

> I interpret this metric (of 6%) to mean just the opposite.

Many countries would sign for a 6% of growth :)

The average growth due to the technology is about a 2%.

6% is not too bad.

> > On the other hand, the theory and practice of information management
> > continues to be important and to grow new limbs.

And the gap between theory and practice is still huge.

> I agree in one sense. I still see the same fundamental problems with data
> definition and management within the context of a single system, or limited
> distributed systems. You seem to be saying that these problems are no
> longer relevant, and that we can just skip these because now we will
> increase scope. But what about the updateability of views and other
> unsolved problems? Where do they stand now?

I would be happy if I could take advantage on the well known solutions.

> Except that SQL is one of the strongest standards that I've encountered.
> It's universal and accepted. That is its one great strength.

And a great hindrance.

The cause of many problems and an innovation inhibitor.

Regards Received on Fri Sep 03 2004 - 14:54:06 CEST