Re: Development as Configuration

From: mAsterdam <mAsterdam_at_vrijdag.org>
Date: Thu, 05 May 2005 23:26:40 +0200
Message-ID: <427a8f91$0$156$e4fe514c@news.xs4all.nl>

dawn wrote:

> Alfredo Novoa wrote:
>

>>>Sure, there are other features that are important
>>>for DBMS tools, such as security and referential 
>>>integrity, but many a software application has included
>>>code for those features too.  To date it appears to me that people 
>>>license DBMS tools for the PRIMARY, not negotiable, feature
>>>of having an API for creating, reading, updating, and deleting
>>>data on secondary storage devices, 
>>>even if there are other important features
>>>too.  Right?
>>
>>Completely wrong. The primary function of a DBMS is
>>to manage data and not to be misused as a file system.

>
> I'm not suggesting what the purpose is -- I saying what a primary
> requirement from the user's perspective it is meeting. There are
> DBMS's that are missing a lot of features, but I don't know of any that
> are deemed to be DBMS's and are missing a CRUD API. So, I would
> suggest that from the standpoint of someone who is looking for a DBMS,
> one feature they would not be interested in compromising on is whether
> it has a CRUD API. It is, I'll repeat, a primary feature for any DBMS
> product. Do you really disagree with that? If so, please provide a
> URL for a DBMS that is missing this feature.

It is not a feature. In order to be able to manage the data, the DSMS must assume there is no data traffic in or out of the database outside the control of the DBMS. So, any DBMS _has_ to provide a data manipulation interface. Received on Thu May 05 2005 - 16:26:40 CDT