Re: Multiplicity, Change and MV

"DonR" <donr_work_at_yahoo.com> wrote in message news:1145930474.671582.50760_at_g10g2000cwb.googlegroups.com...
> My observations are the RM/SQL products have a lot of theory that says
> can be used to make good applications but in practice, many users
> perfer the Pick applications. The R&R story is a good example. I bet
> R&R considered their new product better than their existing one (why
> else would they have built it), but the users have spoken with their
> wallets.
> Since Pick software has been around for thirty years, why do some of
> you still berate it and the people that use it?
> This leads me to believe that the people on this forum are not very
> open minded.

Don,
I'm not trying to start a flame war with you. If anything, I'm trying to stop one. As I recall, you were the person who outlined the internal structure of a Pick file, and I regard that as a useful contribution to the discussions here.

There is a lot of theory that says that RM/SQL products can be used to make good applications in practice. There are also a lot of good applications that have been built using them. There are also a great many poor designs that suffer from a variety of flaws, affecting performance, maintenance, and revision of either the database or the application.

IMO, a lot of this is precisely due to the mainstream position that the RM/SQL products have managed to obtain. There are a lot of idiots in the mainstream, and whatever product gains favor with the mainstream will be the target of their efforts. There are plenty of idiots that aren't in the mainstream, but their efforts tend to gain less notice.

I don't berate Pick or the people who use it, at least not intentionally. What I do argue vehemently against is the position that some Pickies take that professionals using the RM/SQL products are underproductive, and would be more productive if they migrated to Pick. I just don't see enough evidence to support that view. And when Pickies resort to berating the RM/SQL products, and the people who use them, I take exception, just as you do when people do the same thing with Pick.

The last part of your post seems to me to be the "argument by market share", or am I misreading your post? If you are making the argument by marketshare, I'm going to point to the large marketshare enjoyed by Oracle, DB2, and SQL Server, among others of the same ilk. I've done so in past discussions, only to have somebody say "that's because the market is stupid".

Oddly enough, the people who are convinced the market is stupid includes both Pick enthusiasts and relational purists. The relational purists lament the fact that half baked products like the RM/SQL class have misrepresented the relational model to the industry at large. Both sides seem to have religious fervor.

I think relational purists underestimate the ability of professionals among us to live in an eighty-twenty world, and not get swept away by the promise of silver bullets. But that's a topic for another discussion. Received on Tue Apr 25 2006 - 14:14:13 CEST