Re: OT Re: Relational vs network vs hierarchic databases

"Marshall Spight" <mspight_at_dnai.com> wrote in message news:XkUnd.58923$V41.58239_at_attbi_s52...
> "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 think it a little interesting that I went the other direction -- from RDBMS knowledge to OO and Java (a little late on the scene, having learned Java in the last three years). They say that "converts" are the biggest evangelists.

> 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.

I absolutely agree.

> 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.*

It is called "change" -- we heard the same things from the assemby language programmers who were forced to code in COBOL (and tended to write the worst COBOL code, grabbing memory locations 'cause they could, for example). Cheers! --dawn

>
> Marshall
Received on Sun Nov 21 2004 - 21:20:56 CET