Re: the distinction between data and intelligence

Not only interesting, but already in use as well.

I'm supporting an application that actually stores it's conceptual level views in the actual application database (it has a simple logical/conceptual data dictionary). It does this since 1992! the only drawback is that the views are created in a conceptual language that supports just a small subset of current SQL, and the supporting data dictionary is somewhat primitive. Is this practical ? You bet, i've never bothered with documenting the data dictionary/conceptual datamodel, just writing reports against the data dictionary suffices.
BTW the application also stores (almost) everything else in the database as well: Userforms, code, configuration items etc. Except for the application code, that is stored as BLOBs, everything has a simple data model that you can query.
I tried to fix up the code BLOBs and reload it into our datawarehouse with a simple data model instead. But this was too difficult to do efficiently with SQL so I dropped that. Still, a queryable code model would work very well, and would make code maintence a LOT easier, given you've created some good reports on top of that.

• M. Evers