Re: [LIU Comp Sci] Need tutoring on Relational Calculus

On 12/21/2014 05:48 PM, James K. Lowden wrote:
> I suggest that the right approach is to assume everyone involved
> -- author, editor, professor, even the school itself -- are curators of
> knowledge.

that might not be the best assumption in this case. In fact, I'm certain that the current standard curriculum on database theory and application will not stand the test of time. I have lived most of my lifetime through the development of database math and science and it has a long way to go before we can dig in our heels and say, see this is the standard understand model. Frankly, most of the people teaching it don't understand the current theory. And the theory has fundamental problems. A new way to approach this entire problem is going to have to develop, and if what I've read and seen coming out of MIT is an example of the future, it already is evolving.

I went to a postgres developer and asked if they had ER tools and they just chuckled at me.

Actually, not just one, but a table full of them.

The concepts of normalization have undergone an up and down road nearly from the beginning. The more you read them, you more you realize that as a model normalization is a failure.

Then there is another problem, which is that database academic programs are often held hostage to commercial interests. Actually, this is a huge problem and it is severe. Reading the text sometimes sounded like it was cut and pasted right out of Oracle 8.1 brochures.

Meanwhile, people I know who are writing databases engines, google engineers, and such, after speaking with them, they are very apologetic about the theory and then say things like, "You have to learn it but its BS. We can't build databases that run like that for what we do"

That is the definition of a bad data model.

50 years from now, they will not be teaching database modelling and theory like this. In fact, the better schools are already looking at advanced theories which are moving away from the standard view.

There is no reason to assume that the professors, the text or the schools themselves are "curators of knowledge" in computer sciences. I know dozens, if not hundreds of people that are far more advanced than what the school provides.

When I said I wanted to take my masters, my friends said, "Why do that.  Just read it in a book". I felt though, that after 30 years of doing this, there was some formal gaps that I am missing that I would like to improve on. But I am certainly not going to tuck my head between my legs and say, "Oh these are the curators or knowledge". What they are, is a business trying to sell seats, seats that are mostly filled by Indian foreign nationals. And they sell this standardized set of knowledge, which they has been pretty much repeating for a decade with little change, in a science that has had sweeping change.

I know _when_ I'm talking to people with superior knowledge. The intellectual firepower shown ***here*** far exceeds anything I could possibly see on campus. I wish this wasn't true. But it is. Nobody on my campus, for example, could keep up with the GCC mailings list.

It is sad and the Universities, because of this, are having their lunch eaten by springboard institutions that aggressively teach hands on practice and theory.

Look at this place, for example:

 http://flatironschool.com/

These kids learned a lot more than I did. I can critique their approach as well, but they work at real problem solving and theory application.

What I will learn at the university, actually I have learned some great things. But what I will learn is mostly about communicating in a standard language to business clients, in a way that they can understand. Instead of a single 2 hour lecture on relational Albra with 15 minutes of Relational calculus tacked on, I would have spent 3 weeks on relational calculus, and relational algebra, and not spent weeks screwing with Oracle's web interface, and learning about the role of DBA, and drawing UML pictures,

Ruben Received on Mon Dec 22 2014 - 08:35:25 CET