Re: dbdebunk 'Quote of Week' comment

On 8/19/2005 10:15 AM, Alex Papadimoulis wrote:

>>I have found I can use surrogate keys and
>>suffer none of the grief you attribute to them.
>>[...]
>>I guess I should declare 27 years of involvement

Ever watch a ship disappear over the horizon?

> Despite my personal observations, I have not joined the Flat Earth
> Society. I rely on the expertise of others to mathematically prove a
> round earth. I trust the experience of those who have personally
> observed that the earth is in fact round.
>
> When you teach yourself something, you end up relying on your own
> observations and assumptions. When you rely on what you know, you lose
> out on volumes of collective knowledge and experience. Had you not read
> it in a science book, do you really think you'd come to the conclusion
> that the earth is round?
>
> The same holds true for databases. When a programmer self-teaches
> himself databases, he applies his own experience: procedural
> programming. This is what happened in the fifties when there were no
> databases and, therefore, no experience or expertise to go by.
> Programmers back then modeled data exactly like you do now: like a
> programmer.
>
> Fifty years, the data field has made a lot of progress. The best model
> we have now is the relational model. One of the fundamentals of this
> model is that data do not need to be accessed by pointers (meaningless
> keys); they can be accessed (and related) by their value.
>
> When you ignore this fundamental, your model becomes closer and closer
> to the ineffective ways of the past. Worse still, you lose the tools
> they had back then (IDMS pointer functions, for example) to keep their
> models running. As Santayana said, "Those who cannot remember the past
> are condemned to repeat it."
>
Received on Fri Aug 19 2005 - 17:51:51 CEST