Re: <bits OT> dbdebunk 'Quote of Week' comment

"David Cressey" <david.cressey_at_earthlink.net> wrote in message
>
> "Frank_Hamersley" <terabite_at_isat.bigpond.com> wrote in message
[..]
>
> Hmmm. I started out with an IBM 7090 and a PDP-1 (That's a one, not an
> eleven), From there moving on to PDP-6 and 10, DECsystem-10 and 20, and
> VAX. SQL came much later for me, after Pascal, Datatrieve, and VAX
Rdb/VMS.

Woot! How many PDP-1's did they end up making? As I recall my uni had a PDP-6 (with a single digit serial number) but I never got to play with it. One of my associates in the club I believe got it (or perhaps a PDP-8) to play "Fur Elise" by resting a transistor radio inside the card cage and executing a program of repeated instructions that induced the required tones by interference. We used to use a PDP-8 running early Unix to cross compile Modula-2 for an LSI-11 in the undergrad lab and the DEC-10 was the recipient of my first <cough> crack. Apols to less nostalgic readers for suffering my flashbacks.
</OT>

> Celko is right in his diatribe, but he lays it on too thick.

Perhaps - he made the best point in another post (excuse my paraphrasing) that the problem is not the use of surrogate keys per se, but more the use of identity columns for PK's. I guess in the hands of the great unwashed there is not much distinction between the two acts, and religious sermons might prove to be the most effective way to try and hold back the tide.

Cheers Frank. Received on Sun Aug 21 2005 - 13:40:23 CEST