Re: Why is database integrity so impopular ?

On Oct 5, 5:56 pm, Alfredo Novoa <alfred..._at_gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello Eric,
>
> ...
>
> The problem is not in modern database theory, the problem is that most
> developers don't know the foundations of their profession and common
> sense is very uncommon.
>
> In my country most people who develop business systems never read a
> database theory book. The few ones who studied a database course in
> the university never understood database theory very well at all, and
> they forgot almost everything just on the end of the final
> examination.
>
> The textbook we used didn't have any chapter devoted to database
> integrity, only a few pages about the poor SQL declarative integrity
> support, and not covered with exercices. The whole Relational Model
> was dispatched in five hours or so, and taught with many mistakes and
> misconceptions.
>
> The vendor's training materials are usually even worse.
>
> And we also have all that abject oriented programming stuff saying
> that RDBMS's are nothing but silly and cumbersome register buckets.
>
> It is not only integrity and normalization. Most developers I know are
> not able to write non trivial queries and they load the data in the
> applications using simple queries, make several iterations on the
> registers, and send the data back to the DBMS.
>
> In the business software industry, technical incompetence is the norm,
> and the develpment tools we have are awful.
>
> Regards

My complaint is that there's too much work to be done and not enough money to pay for the more expensive relational purists to implement stuff. What the industry needs is to split up the database into components so that implementers can decide how to persist their applications. Sometimes you just want to write data reliably without worrying about what normalization level you're at.

If and when a project needs fully relational recordkeeping, this should be available too for those projects that can budget for it. Received on Fri Oct 31 2008 - 21:16:11 CET