Re: OT Re: Relational vs network vs hierarchic databases

"Dan" <guntermann_at_verizon.com> wrote in message news:HHCnd.1160$0k1.504_at_trnddc08...
>
> "Marshall Spight" <mspight_at_dnai.com> wrote in message
> news:5VBnd.361746$wV.199752_at_attbi_s54...
>
> > I was a fairly staunch OO guy once upon a time, and I was rather
> > convinced that relational databases were boring and stupid.
>
> Out of curiosity, what was the impetus for such a broadening leap? It seems
> to me that individuals such as you are a rare breed indeed. Of course
> psychology, creative writing, and computer science are pretty broad and
> independent strokes themselves.

Well, gosh, what a flattering question.

I had been working on middleware for a few years. I'd gotten a job (via my OO skills) programming ODBC, OCI, etc. drivers. I didn't really know the API very well or what it was used for, but you can network-enable anything without actually knowing much about it.

I recall a conversation with a PM (no less) in which I had proposed some dumb idea of how to model something with tables. The PM said, you'd more typically do some things like this. And he showed me a many-to-many table, and how you could use it and query it, etc. And suddenly these seemingly-simple relational operators were doing something quite clever, and it was actually doing something that was problematic in OO.

So after having mocked SQL for some years, I made it a point to learn more about it. I had heard this term "third normal form" and started doing web searches for it, and went and bought some books by Date.

> Forget of course that that OO, particularly Java, is not the screaming
> performance devil itself. With the same logic in isolation, we could
> advocate dumping OO and going back to assembly language (or even C). So
> perhaps OO proponents should know better...

I dunno. I just don't care that much about performance any more. I mean, I care if something is O(n^2) vs. O(n log n) but I don't so much care about language speed. Java is fast enough.

Actually, it's funny what perspective brings. I can recall a whole host of arguments (many performance related) that the C world tried to use to shoot down C++, and then, ten years later, many of those same style of arguments being fired at Java, *by the C++ people.*

Marshall Received on Sun Nov 21 2004 - 04:55:35 CET