Re: Object oriented database

On Nov 1, 10:03 pm, paul c <toledobythe..._at_oohay.ac> wrote:
> Walter Mitty wrote:
>
> ...
>
> > There have been dozens of object vs relational discussions in this newsgroup
> > over the years.  They usually degenerate into a fruitless pissing contest
> > after only a few replies back and forth.  It's possible that this discussion
> > will generate some useful dialogue that the previous discussions did not.
> > But most regulars don't expect that to happen.
> > ...
>
> I suspect the reason is that most or all of the alternatives to
> relational theory offer no logical theory so it is a misconception to
> call them alternatives.  Just because the RM has the most coherent
> theory so far doesn't mean somebody (smarter than I) couldn't come up
> with a logical alternative but I'd say that hasn't happened yet, here or
> elsewhere.
>
> Now that I notice all the posts, it does seem we have a troll in our
> midst.  This seems to happen here once or twice a year, maybe so rarely
> because most of the posters here are more disciplined than in some
> groups.  My apologies to everybody else for not recognizing this one sooner.

I have had the opportunity to interact with numerous top-notch software engineers - people who have, out of necessity, worked for decades now with OO, on large scale projects. The interesting thing is that they all seem to develop best practices of using those tools in ways that mimic policies that are core to RM (without even realizing the correlation). They focus on interfaces and storing underlying data as neutrally as possible. They do not rely solely on OID's, and use constant identifiers to access objects logically. They decompose data organization in ways that echo normalization. And they use invariants to mimic predicate constraints.

These are the people who are worth discussing data models with because, well, they realise OO isn't one, and they have built another on top as best they could within its constraints. Received on Sun Nov 02 2008 - 00:40:42 CET