Re: The wisdom of the object mentors (Was: Searching OO Associations with RDBMS Persistence Models)

CMCC wrote:
> Marshall wrote:
>
> I speak in terms of what he *seems to have written*. Somehow I have
> to refer to what it is I am talking about! And that is the subject of
> this thead.

Grrrr. Okay, fine; I'll do the work. In the future if you have a question
for me, it will be necessary to ask me the full actual question, and not refer ambiguously to things written elsewhere.

[scanning back through the thread ...]

Okay, maybe you are asking about this:

>No, a DBMS is a bucket of bits with some low level rules to manage
>those bits. An OO application provides the beavior that the customer
>wants to see. We can completely eliminate the DBMS and replace it with
>another of an entirely different form (non Relational for example) and
>still have all the business behavior we need.
>The people who sell databases have sold you, and the industry, a
>misconception: that the database is the heart of the system. This is
>flawed. The heart of the system is the application code. The database
>is a detail to be decided at the last possible moment and kept in a
>position so flexible that it can be swapped out for another at a whim.

There are many different contexts in which software is developed. I will speak relative to enterprise software, which is where DBMS software is often found. In that context, the above quoted paragraph is pure, unadulterated garbage. It is not simply valueless; it is actively harmful. The writer furthermore demonstrates that he completely lacks any understanding of what the field of data management is, or what it is for, or why it is useful.

The reason why you see crap like this is because it is being written by application developers. Application developers are great at writing applications, but once they have success in that one area, they overgeneralize and begin to believe that their techniques are the correct techniques to apply to every software development area. However this represents a multi-decade regression in the field of data management.

Data management in the 1960s lacked any understanding of the issues that the field has today. And if the application programmers have their way, and the existing field of data management is discarded, those same application programmers will face all the same problems that the programmers of the 1960s did, over again. And over the decades, they'll build systems that tackle questions like integrity enforcement, ad hoc queries, transaction management, etc. Slowly, they will reinvent the field.

And, if they do so, it would be poetic justice if the programmers being born today trash all their work in favor of some new fad.

Marshall Received on Wed May 31 2006 - 00:54:53 CEST