Re: Generalised approach to storing address details

From: paul c <toledobythesea_at_oohay.ac>
Date: Wed, 13 Dec 2006 01:00:01 GMT
Message-ID: <lgIfh.477037$R63.321211@pd7urf1no>

Rob wrote:
> Cimode wrote:
>

>>RM was created on the first place in the perspective of getting away
>>from the sterile hierarchic paradigm of computing...A way for breaking
>>the vicious circle in which lots of idiots try to get us back...
>>

>
>
> Entirely false and self-serving.
>
> First, RM was created in "reaction to the escalating costs required for
> deploying and maintaining complex systems". It had nothing to do with
> 'getting away from the sterile hierarchic paradigm of computing' and
> everything to do with providing a logical, declarative data model which
> would allow "programmers to describe the information they wanted and
> to leave the details of optimization and access to the database
> management system". [Double quoted text from:
>
> http://www.acmqueue.com/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=299
>
> ]
>
> Second, 'sterile hierarchic paradigm of computing' is your opinion,
> nothing more. In point of fact, everything the average computer
> enduser/knowledgeworker uses (besides spreadsheets and SQL responses)
> is hierarchical: menus, org charts, table of contents, the Web.
> Sterile for you perhaps, but effective for the rest of us.
>
> If one objective of database experts is to broaden access to
> databases and use of relational technologies, perhaps the experts
> should show some concern for making such access and use available
> through interfaces (like hierarchical) that are more intuitive
> to non-experts instead of branding as 'idiots' anyone who cannot
> master modeling with relations, formulating queries in SQL or
> making sense of unnormalized SQL extensions (i.e., query
> responses).
>
> Your vitriol sounds to me like job security: As long as the gcd
> (greatest common denominator) interface to RDBs and RDBMEs (engines,
> servers) remains SQL, you will be in great demand. Considering that
> a small business could deploy a competent RDBMS for less than $5K
> and the annual cost of one SQL expert is upwards of $250K, one has
> to regard the SQL Meta Meta Model as the most significant obstacle
> to the widespread DIRECT use of database technology by those who
> are not SQL experts.
>
> Rob
>

Don't believe everything you read. The above and the link make it sound as if a famous corporate body could predict the future, which wasn't true thirty-five years ago and isn't now! It's usually a rare individual who happens to do that, usually without knowing it.

In 1969, an average programmer's salary was somewhere between 2% and 5% of a small IBM mainframe nominal purchase price (often, they could only be leased or rented) and an even smaller portion of a large one. That doesn't count maintenance and peripherals which could multiple the hardward cost.

Look for some other sources. It shouldn't be hard to see that Codd's early effort was not part of a concerted research effort and it shouldn't be hard to see that one of his big interests was to show what adhoc, illogical quicksand the typical, physically-oriented database efforts of the day were built on, such as IBM's IMS and Vandl and all the Cincom and IDS stuff. It wasn't so much cost that Codd was interested in but rather dispelling some of the nonsense. In many endeavours, dispelling nonsense can reduce costs. Obviously savings would arise from one of his main points, the idea of sharing data rather than replicating it as those "DB" products did, but the fact was that at that time, the bulk of commercial data was not even maintained by so-called dbms'es, rather file-based applications.

p Received on Tue Dec 12 2006 - 19:00:01 CST