1. Quote of the Week
He started his SQL Server career when he debuted as an accidental DBA in 2005. Seeing Reporting Services 2005 demoed for the first time sealed the deal, and it has been all data ever since, leaving the worlds of networking and systems admin behind. After being a full-time dev/operational DBA with everything since SQL 2000, he is now back to BI, as a Senior BI Engineer/Consultant. --Online Bio
2. To Laugh or Cry?
3. Online Debunkings
4. Interesting Elsewhere
Obfuscated SQL Contest Winners!
H/t Todd Everett.
5. And now for something completely different
In a LinkedIn thread that followed my Comments On Stonebraker Interview, Erwin Smout mentioned David Maier's 1991 critique of the 1990 Third Generation Data Base System Manifesto (3GM), of which Stonebraker was one of the authors. I was aware of the 3GM, of course, but had not read it because, at the time, it did not benefit from favorable reviews. I considered The Third Manifesto by Date and Darwen more significant, in part because it was authored by relational experts and because it was backed up by a proposed fully computational language with a fully relational component. But when Erwin mentioned Maier's piece, I asked him if he had a copy and he found a scanned PDF copy online.
Having not read the 3GM, I am not in a position to comment on Maier's critique thereof, but I would like to comment on the general topics in his Preliminaries that attracted my attention.
Housekeeping: I have added the following:
1. Quote of the Week
I am new to this domain. Please guide me to choose which database to choose among the NOSQL databases. Also which OS the database supports and how to add data to the database(which language). The requirement is to store pictures and alpha numeric s in database. A web server would be designed to extract data from the database and display in web application. The important requirement is scalability so I explored and found that NoSQL database will best fit the requirement. --LinkedIn.com
CJ Date calls this "I don't know how to do my job and am looking for somebody to do it for me."
2. To Laugh or Cry?
Docbase, Graphbase, Colubase, Triplestore ,which better fo RDF triples
3. Online Debunkings
4. Interesting Elsewhere
5. And now for something completely different
Revised: 12/2017
Interviewed about his Turing Award, Michael Stonebraker is "modest" about his jointly-with-others contribution:
"... the Ingres database [sic] brought Codd’s lofty relational ideas into the realm of ordinary individuals ... turned [them] into constructs that could be manipulated by ordinary people ... it was argued at the time that RDBMS couldn’t perform, but we showed it could be efficient."
and gives most of the credit to "Ted" Codd:
"What Ted proposed was radical ... a complete change from how things were being done in database [sic] ... he turned the problem of data management into one of relations. That dramatically simplified things ... The conventional wisdom was that you should build for the particulars of how the data is stored. He saw that made no sense ... he [moved] the actual manipulation of data away from assembly language programming of the time to higher levels of abstraction that would later become structured query language, or SQL ... He brought principles of encapsulation and abstraction to programming databases, like with a high-level-language in programming."
Quite. Except that Ted was vehemently critical of SQL as a botched concretization of the RDM which, as it turned out, ensured that his ideas would never be truly and fully implemented (one of which, incidentally, was a relational declarative data sublanguage that would replace programming for data management DBMS functions). On the one hand SQL, whatever its flaws, was much superior to the database technologies that preceded it; on the other it has been forever identified with the RDM, to the point where the chance for true RDBMSs was lost (the assembly language statement is not quite accurate -- COBOL, FORTRAN and special purpose languages were used at the time -- assembly language was used for writing access methods at the I/O level, but even that wasn't pure).
1. Quote of the Week
To clarify my point further, although M doesn't care about how it's implemented, the implementation has a strong influence on the logical structures that it's trying to implement. In a normalized or demoralized [sic] debate, a fully normalized physical schema is always good, when implemented on an infinite performance hardware. --LinkedIn.com
2. To Laugh or Cry?
I recently attended a presentation on Azure DocumentDB, Microsoft's NoSQL cloud product. I made the following notes:
- Polyglot persistence: Wasn't this what the RDM was supposed to substitute?
- Hierarchy: Didn't we get rid of HDM decades ago?
- NoSQL: No SQL, but a "SQL-like" language (it's barely relational and now it's used for documents?)
- No integrity, data independence: Nothing learned from the past.
- Cloud: At least mainframes were under each company's control.
Progress.
3. Online Debunkings
Comments on "Michael Stonebraker Explains Oracle’s Obsolescence, Facebook’s Enormous Challenge"
4. Interesting Elsewhere
Unskilled and Unaware of It
5. And now for something completely different
My April post @All Analytics.
Aside from domain constraints, every R-table designed to represent a
single class of entities is also subject to table constraints that
approximate in the database class business rules in the real world. If
the rules are not documented, for the conscientious analyst who wants to
guarantee sensible data manipulation and result interpretation they are
the next best thing.
Read it All. (Please comment there, not here)
DBDebunk readers should know of David McGoveran (see his bibliography under FUNDAMENTALS), whose work on relational theory and practice has appeared or been discussed on the old site and here over the years. On more than one occasion I mentioned the Principle of Orthogonal Design (POOD) identified by David, who had published several years ago work he did on the subject with Chris Date. The POOD has relevance to updating relations and particularly views and led to Date's VIEW UPDATING AND RELATIONAL THEORY book .
I recently mentioned that David's and Date's understandings on POOD have diverged since their joint effort--currently Date and Darwen reject the POOD as formulated then and David has problems with Date's understanding of it and with their THE THIRD MANIFESTO (TTM) book.
David is working on a book tentatively titled LOGIC FOR SERIOUS DATABASE FOLKS where he will detail his views on RDM in general and POOD and view updating in particular, but in the meantime I asked him to publish an early draft of a chapter on the latter subject, which he did-- Can All Relations Be Updated?--and which he has just revised.
He has asked me to post a clarification on the nature of the differences with Date and Darwen (see next) and I used the opportunity to interview him about his impressive career, which covers much more than database management. David provided written answers to questions.
