Re: Object-oriented thinking in SQL context?

On Jun 15, 12:38 am, David BL <davi..._at_iinet.net.au> wrote:
> On Jun 12, 10:42 pm, Marshall <marshall.spi..._at_gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Bob's support comes from the substance of his posts, not his vitriol.

I used to believe that too. Finding out that it wasn't true was quite a shock, I must tell you.

At the height of my anti-Bob attacks, I had a number of people write to me, both publicly and privately, specifically in support of Bob's vitriol.

> For most people that choice is made in what they choose to read. One
> of the good things about the Internet is freedom of speech. Do you
> really think it should be controlled, so viewpoints that you or Bob
> consider objectionable or harmful can be suppressed?

No, I sure don't. Note that an inevitable consequence of belief in the value of free speech is that it necessarily entails that Bob gets to say all the things that are currently being debated.

> If you don't trust people to make up their own mind, you could always
> respond to an obviously bad poster with something short and factual.
> E.g.
>
> "That post confused the definition of 5th normal
> form making it unintelligible".
>
> It takes less effort and has more venom than a longer post full of
> insults. In any case, you don't need to be told how to suck eggs and
> you mostly take the high road. It's one reason I think highly of you.

Well, back at you. You're one of my favorite posters.

> I came here because I'm researching the concurrent editing of data
> using Operational Transform (OT). I'm interested in recursive data
> types that for example are associated with scene graphs.
> Unfortunately Bob has been so effective at "cleansing" this NG it is
> difficult to get anything but D&D viewpoints here. Someone interested
> in a domain like CAD and interested in recursive data types would be
> viewed as an OO loving idiot by Bob and not last long here. He
> attacks people that may actually have something interesting to say.
>
> When I first arrived at cdt I was "censored" for suggesting there
> could be OT based applications where a simple rwlock is more
> appropriate than a conventional lock manager based on strict 2PL. Bob
> was derisive, yet his arguments were merely simplistic generalisations
> - all of which arose from ignorance of OT. For example:
>
> "Are you suggesting that it is possible to acquire
> and release a universal exclusive lock over a
> distributed system in less than 200 microseconds?"
>
> In another post he implied incorrectly that distributed database
> systems must support distributed transactions. Again this stems from
> ignorance.
>
> His only interesting contribution was a reference to a paper by Jim
> Gray that claimed update anywhere-anytime-anyway transactional
> replication was inherently unable to scale because reconciliations
> grow with cubic order. However in reality Bob was just a VI, and
> that's the part I find so ironic. He was unaware of the literature on
> OT and the sense in which Gray's result was inapplicable (even the
> abstract mentions that commutative update transactions avoid the
> instability), and yet pretended to be an authority on the subject.
>
> You may be interested in some of the mathematics behind OT. For
> example lattice theory is relevant to causality preservation in a
> distributed system.

Yes, I'm quite interested in such things as distributed transactions, but they're pretty far down on my queue right now.

Kinda gotta go; I'm really short on sleep lately.

Marshall Received on Tue Jun 16 2009 - 07:57:14 CEST