Re: Ghost Town

David Cressey wrote:
> "Marshall Spight" <marshall.spight_at_gmail.com> wrote in message
> news:1122147449.478112.321090_at_g47g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
> > Geeze, this place is dead lately.
> >
> > Hello? Anyone there?
> >
> > <nothin>
>
> When I first saw you in this NG, your level of sophistication about
> computing in general was quite high, but your level of sophistication about
> RDBM systems wasn't quite up to the rest of your knowledge.

My slip is showing! :-)

Yeah, that sounds about right. Most of my experience is in application and system programming. I came late to the data management field, mostly
by accident, having gotten the job of writing things like ODBC and OCI drivers. Like most if not all application programmers, I initially scoffed
at SQL, until it became impossible to scoff. I kept hearing this phrase "normal forms" and I wanted to learn more about that, which lead me to Date et al, which led me here. It was here that I was goaded into trying
to learn more about formal systems. (Anyone remember Costin Cozianu?) Not
something I'd ever paid attention to before.

I work with SQL a lot these days, but the places I do aren't ususally doing a lot with it. FK is the only kind of constraint I've been able to use on the job, and I've never written a stored procedure. I've never used a view. Sigh.

> So I felt
> comfortable sharing what I could from implementations of specific RDBMS
> products like Oracle or Rdb/VMS.

Thanks!

> My interest is in database design, rather than database theory. This NG is
> about database theory, rhather than database design. There's some overlap,
> but they really aren't the same interest.

Fair enough. I really feel like theory and practice go hand-in-hand, and
we need people steeped in both here. They keep each other honest.

Marshall Received on Sun Jul 24 2005 - 18:55:54 CEST