Re: Resiliency To New Data Requirements

Keith H Duggar wrote:
<snip>
>
> This is why Dawn writes articles with arrogant titles like
> "Is Codd Dead?" and makes derisive comments about work that
> long preceded her intellectual capacity to comprehend it.

Is there really a need to bring me into this and trash me, Keith? The title of the blog was all about marketing, brother. Time did Ok with the original "Is God Dead?" and how else was a girl sittin' in the middle of the corn fields not connected to any large corporations gonna get thousands of readers for the launch of her blog?

To your point, don't forget, I'm definitely working with information that pre-dates me. MultiValued databases pre-date 1NF. I'm definitely not diss'ing the relational model like the RM-advocates have trashed the models that came before it (even though they seemed to have ZERO emperical data to prove their point). So your history lesson (which I see I snipped) is not all that relevant. Additionally, I work from this angle -- the quote I keep around from George Bernard Shaw

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."

(I do the translation on the pronouns.)

In spite of being a reader in a variety of subjects, I have no problem stating clearly that I am ignorant of many things (unlike some on this list who seem to think they are all-knowing). What really irks some people is that they know that I really do understand enough about set theory and predicate logic to know why Codd came up with normalization (as originally defined) in the first place. I really do have a modicum of intelligence and capability, even if there are greater minds than mine in this forum.

I'm an end-user of DBMS tools (often an end-end-user) and they simply need to work better, so I want them to adapt to me, Al Franken, because I want progress. They need to be more flexible. They need to permit developers to specify data structures such as lists and, generally, to model data in a way that is more flexible for software development and maintenance over time. Lists can be defined in set theory too, by the way. There is nothing evil about them (I taught Godel's theorem, including the proof of it, once upon a time, so don't snow me with that) and they are useful.

In theory lists can now be defined with user-defined domains in the RM, but they are not integral to the RM "data model" and I want them in any "data model" I use for typical DB101 applications. Why not? Whatever the hang-up is, get over it. It was proven useful before Codd to employ them and it is still useful to model "property lists" as multivalued attributes. Many developers do it all the time in software applications today. For a couple of decades many felt guilty about not "normalizing" their data, but that isn't what I hear today. NF2 (Non-first-normal-form) and 2VL (two-valued logic) data modeling is on an upward trend. It is time to ditch The Information Principle."

However ignorant (sure) or arrogant (you don't know me then) you think I am, I don't waste my time writing about how others are less intelligent, more arrogant, or more ignorant than I (I do waste time on some reality shows, however, and I'm watching Jon Stewart right now, but that is surely not a waste of time, right?). Instead, I have a "hobby" of trying to make a small difference in an area that I think needs some changes in order to help software developers provide better bang for the buck solutions.

Onward. --dawn
P.S. I figured I respond so that you didn't look like a coward attacking someone who wasn't around to defend herself. smiles. Received on Wed Aug 09 2006 - 05:13:21 CEST