Re: The IDS, the EDS and the DBMS

From: Marshall Spight <mspight_at_dnai.com>
Date: Sun, 05 Sep 2004 19:00:30 GMT
Message-ID: <inJ_c.245876$8_6.63461@attbi_s04>

"Laconic2" <laconic2_at_comcast.net> wrote in message news:g4Cdnf7_yMi80qfcRVn-rg_at_comcast.com...

> Not necessarily. Just because there is no goal of including metadata or the
> subject of structured queries
> doesn't mean that EDS builders might not want to provide concurrency
> control, and shared access, among many objects of the same class. I'll
> leave the specifics up to would be EDS builders.

Okay, so at first the application guys/EDS people want persistence. Now it's circa-1960 for the DBMS crowd. Then they want shared access. Now it's 1970. Then they want concurrency and it's 1980. Now they want client-server and it's 1990. Then they decide they want the metadata after all. Then they discover they need ad-hoc queries, and declarative integrity, and by the way, structural inheritance is starting to look weak; can't we compose collections in some more general way?

Thus Spight's Law is born. Those people need a DBMS; they just haven't realized it yet.

When the OO people try to do data management without attending to the work done *in the field of data management* for the last 40 years, they're being, at best, NIH, and at worst, stump-ignorant.

Of course, the same can be said of relational folk who fail to attend to the lessons learned by application developers during the same period. As I said, we need not a mapping but a unification.

Marshall Received on Sun Sep 05 2004 - 14:00:30 CDT