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

From: <frebe73_at_gmail.com>
Date: 1 Jun 2006 03:56:01 -0700
Message-ID: <1149159361.846295.4330_at_g10g2000cwb.googlegroups.com>


> Fair enough. But in that case you have at least committed to using a
> SQL DBMS, and that it will be from one of the major players in the
> market. That is somewhat different from RCM's position, which is (as I
> understand it) that it should be trivial to unplug your SQL DBMS and
> replace it by something else that doesn't even use SQL.

The big questing is: Why do you want to unplug the SQL DBMS? It is very likely that the application programming language will be replace long before SQL is replaced. In that case, all work to decouple the the application from the DBMS is wasted. The productivity using an embedded approach (LAMP for example) is much higher than an layered/decoupled approach. If you make the decision to take this extra cost you need to be pretty sure that your application programming language will survive longer than SQL.

The (possible) future replacement for SQL (and the relational model) will probably be something that are very hard to imagine at the current moment. If we design an interface between the database and the application today, it is not likely that it will fit the next generation architecture. I have seen old applications using index file system with an interface between the application and the datastore. When the index file system is replaced by a SQL database, SQL had to be used in a very primitive way, because the designers of the interface could not imagine how future SQL databases would look like.

If we look back at the history we can see that every generation of databases have been more high-level and has reduced the amount of logic you have to put in the application. It is resonable to believe that the next generation of database will do a lot of stuff that the applications do today.

Fredrik Bertilsson
http://frebe.php0h.com Received on Thu Jun 01 2006 - 12:56:01 CEST

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