Re: The IDS, the EDS and the DBMS

"mAsterdam" <mAsterdam_at_vrijdag.org> wrote in message news:4139e02c$0$78749$e4fe514c_at_news.xs4all.nl...
> Laconic2 wrote:
> > mAsterdam wrote:
> >>... The unit of integrity is the database.
> > Yes. In other words, in my view, the application is one great
>
> No! "*my* view" (emphasis mine).
> One of the (your) purposes of talking EDS vs IDS was to get
> the discussion out of this them vs. us tone, right?

I need to clarify something here. When I used the phrase "my view", I did NOT mean "My opinion about what the correct view is". That's like the blind men arguing about what an elephant looks like. I realized, much later, that it could be read the wrong way by a reasonable person.

What I meant was "the view from the perspective that my role encourages me to take". My role, back when I was doing that role was fixing databases, not applications. That's why I viewed them as black boxes. Programmers sometimes came to me with SQL, asking me to speed it up for them. But what I was really hired for was to make the database work better.

My view is one valid one among many. It depnds on the context.

An application manager might view the application as a transparent box, but each program as a black box. That's valid, in context.

An application programmer might view a program as a transparent box, but some object inside it as a black box. That's valid, in context.

Another programmer, tasked to revise and extend a class of objects, might view that class as a transparent box, and other objects inside that class as black boxes. That's valid, in context.

My point is that those who view their own perspective as "informed" and all the other perspectives as "moronic" are usually myopic themselves. Received on Mon Sep 06 2004 - 19:27:36 CEST