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1. Quote of the Week

Those who argue for natural keys typically do so from a position of philosophical purity, as is the case in the Simple Talk article you cited. In my (25+) years of experience, people who argue from this position are long on education and short on real-world experience. In the real world just about every natural key I've ever come across is subject to duplication and/or redefinition. There are very few cases outside of smallish code tables where it is practical to take the philosophical high ground regarding natural keys. --StackExchange.com

2. To Laugh or Cry?

R2G a Tool for Migrating Relations to Graphs

H/t Erwin Smout.

3. Online debunkings

• Using tools without foundation knowledge will mislead
• Inheritance in relational database

4. Interesting elsewhere

The Delusions of Big Data

Must read.

5. And now for something completely different

Ebola-- Failures of Imagination

Not to worry, America, Ebola will go to India first.

Can you detect the stealth animals hiding in all these pictures?

Fascinating.

About The PostWest:

• Baby killed as car rams crowd in Jerusalem terror attack
• Palestinians pelt Jerusalem kindergarten with rocks

Jihadism is OK as long as it kills Jews. Nice people. Let's ...

Irish parliament calls on government to recognize Palestine

... give them a state. Really?

Pat Condell: 'Boo Hoo Palestine'

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1. Quote of the Week

Q: What's the key technical skills for Data Modeling? 
A: Erwin or Rational or phycial [sic] modelling or conceptual modelling or Logical modelling. --LinkedIn.com 

NULL means data is not available, nothing more...--LinkedIn.com

In case you were wondering.


2. To Laugh or Cry?

Oldie, but goodie from old dbdebunk:

On a Pile of ... what?

3. Online debunkings

• Paper #6 has been published
• Which NF is violated if subtype attributes are rolled up into the Supertype?
• Weak Entities, Referential Constraints & Normalization

4. Elsewhere

• An open letter to L.Bass by E.W. Dijkstra
• Zeno's Tortoise by D. McGoveran

5. And now for something completely different
CDC blames cuts for Ebola response, pays millions in bonuses

About The PostWest:

• Mob vandalizes Crown Heights kosher market
• France to host Palestinian unity government
• Talk of 'Jewish lobby' surfaces during UK Palestine vote
• Israel fails to tie rebuilding Gaza to disarming Hamas
• 'Post-sanctions' Iran conference in London

Never again? Think again: they're at it again, to finish the job.

The Bible's Buried Secrets

Fascinating.

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 by Erwin Smout and Fabian Pascal

"To be as precise as we possibly can is not a luxurious mannerism that the academic prig can afford himself in his (supposedly!) sheltered environment; for people facing the problems of "the real world" it is a Must." --E.W. Dijkstra, An Open Letter to L. Bass

From In Some Cases illustrating drawbacks of SQL in data computing and analytics: 

The computing power of SQL for mass structured data is complete, that is to say, it is impossible to find anything that SQL cannot compute. But its support layer is too low, which can lead to over-elaborate operation in practical application.

One of the four aspects of this "over-elaboration" is "computation without substep", but before we comment on it, the article glosses over an important matter.

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Housekeeping: I have added FUNDAMENTALS links on HOME page to:

• My old TechTarget column Against the Grain
• David McGoveran's new publications page

 1. Quote of the Week

I am teaching a database design course next year. What do you think should be covered in an introductory course? --LinkedIn.com

I have a requirement for an ERwin data modeler (Logical, Physical, 3NF and Star Schema). --LinkedIn.com

2. To Laugh or Cry?

What would be key entities in Automotive Industry MDM

3. Online debunkings

• Wow Apple Runs 75,000+ nodes on Apache Cassandra
• Procedural vs. Declarative languages
• The role of data modeling in Big Data, massive parallelism and the “cloud”

4. Must read elsewhere

Out of the Tar Pit

5. And now for something completely different

Ig Nobel Prize Winners

Cry, don't laugh.

Hey There Little Electron, Why Won't You Tell Me Where You Came From

Fascinating.

Israel is holding back channel talks with the 'Palestinian Authority' relating to Gaza, in which it is making concessions and receiving nothing in return.

The Tower cites a Wall Street Journal report that indicates that Western negotiators are so desperate for a deal with Iran that they are offering more significant sanctions relief for a deal that would not stop Iran from developing nuclear weapons.

Why the West is PostWest: The Blackmailer Paradox (Aumann is Nobel laureate in economics).

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The Wired article Ex-Googler Shares His Big-Data Secrets With the Masses touts a new tool that "mimics the way web giants like Google and Facebook rapidly analyze enormous amounts of online information." The article calls the tool "simple for analysts to query data from anywhere in a company with a single tool, regardless of where that data is stored, without the need to learn new programming languages."

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1. Quote of the Week

Further to that point, in my mind you can have a database that is both relational and schema-less, in the sense that it is relational if the only thing in it is relations but it is schema-less if any data updating operation is allowed to change the number or degree etc of said relations, rather than that being reserved for so called data-definition operations. --LinkedIn.com

2. To Laugh or Cry?

Turning dirty data words into sweet talk

And an oldie, but goodie

Gardner to DBAs, BI Vendors Reinvent Yourselves

3. Online Debunkings

• The role of data modeling in the coming move to Big Data, massive parallelism, and the “cloud”
• The fine line between “informality” and “loss of intellectual rigor
• The impact of social media technologies on data modeling

4. Elsewhere

An old classic:

Unskilled and Unaware of It

and a related consequence

How Our Botched Understanding of Science Ruins Everything

5. And now for something completely different
"Enjoy":

John Oliver: Nuclear Weapons

Fascinating:

Freaky Physics Experiment May Prove Our Universe Is A Two-Dimensional Hologram

About the PostWest:

PA: Israelis Must Return to Their Countries of Origin

How about the Arabs in Palestine, most of of whom originate in immigrants from Arab countries attracted to Palestine by jobs created by Jewish development?

• Gaza Schoolchildren Traumatized by Sounds of Hamas Torture 
• More on child terrorists in Gaza
• 12-year old Gaza boy, playing resistance, dies digging a tunnel

If it's not Jews doing it, who cares. It's not so much care for Palestinians as it is hate of the Jews.
Any way, Nice people. Let's give them a state.

US Providing Indirect Military Aid to Hezbollah

Afghanistan and Iraq redux.

Go Easy on Iran So It Fights ISIS? That's Absurd

Indeed: Why should the US allow an enemy nuclear weapons, when fighting ISIS is Iran's own existential interest anyway? Let radical Shia and Sunni duel it out.

World Council of Churches Demands Israel Release Terrorists

Ah, yes, religion is the source of morality.

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Pls see the PAPERS page for the current version of the paper, when it becomes available.