Re: Has E/R had a negative impact on db?

SD wrote:

> On 4/20/2006 9:12 AM, Jon Heggland wrote:
>

>> JOG wrote:
>>
>>> I don't like entities. In fact I despise entities, as the enemy of good
>>> information philosophy. [...]
>>>
>>> Okay, so for those in the know this isn't an issue and E/R is a useful
>>> tool. But for those not in the know (which appears to be a lot of the
>>> industry) it promotes the fallacy of the Entity/Relationship
>>> distinction, of impenetrable wrappers, and encourages the mindset that
>>> has lead to OODBMS, XML databases, etc.
>>
>>
>> Agreed. ORM is much better in this regard. It was a major revelation to
>> me to think in terms of *facts* instead of entities.

Huh? An entity in E/R corresponds to a relation in an RDBMS. A relationship in E/R corresponds to a relation in an RDBMS.

Two things in E/R = one thing in RDBMS, and this makes it "too close" ?

> Does a business analyst understand E/R?

What a business analyst understands depends very much on the business analyst.

> ORM was a revelation to me, but sadly it appears to be dying because
> tech heads like to think they are god and keep "knowledge" to themselves.

I suspect knowledge greed is more of a cultural thing. I have known more than a few techies who were very generous with knowledge, and I have known more than a few decidedly non-techie people who hoarded information for personal advantage.

In my mind, the achilles heel of techies involves a drive to invent new tools (and new uses for the tools they have) instead of learning the principles by which to identify the right tool. In other words, what they know is more important than what others can teach them.

On a Myers-Briggs scale, I suspect the overwhelming majority of techies would share three of the four characteristics. In regular expression form, the Myer-Briggs for techies would look like: I(N|S)TP Received on Thu Apr 20 2006 - 16:54:26 CEST