Re: Sensible and NonsenSQL Aspects of the NoSQL Hoopla

On 2013-09-01 18:37:17 +0000, Norbert_Paul said:

> The paper does not mention the spatial databasers. What are their
> historical part of the NoSQL movement?

I don't think has played a big part in practice, although the NoSQL advocates nodoubt will be happy to use it as ammunition when arguing that there are inadequacies to be found in the relational model and/or SQL.
> For example http://www.spatial.maine.edu/~max/RJ6.html not only argues
> against actual shortcomings of SQL1 in the standard of 1898
> http://www2.yk.psu.edu/~lxn/IST_210/sql1_versus_sql2.html
> but also against the relational model. However, I simply don't get
> some of the arguments therein:

[.. SNIP ..] Neither do I, and my compliments for the analyis. Am I right in reading some irritation between the lines that goes beyond a natural distaste for shoddy reasoning?

What to say about these things? Yes, it is unfortunate that in this type of papers, where certain languages or models are bashed and other are promoted, for some reason all basic scientific principles seem to go out of the window and all reasoning becomes more or less based on intuitive gut-feeling and uncritically accepting communis opinio from the community that the writer is publishing in. Science should be about critically and skeptically investigating claims or providing good evidence for them that convinces the informed intelligent but skeptical reader. But there are practical reasons that I'm all too familiar with for why for real-world database researcher that bar is often a bit too high.

For the record, as you know I'm also very critical of the relational camp around Date, Fabian etc., and in fact of the opinion that they also commit offences against proper scientific etiquette that are at least as bad.

PS. Nice to see that there seems to be a little bit of life coming back to comp.databases.theory. :-)

• Jan Hidders