Note: To demonstrate the correctness and stability due to a sound theoretical foundation relative to the industry's fad-driven "cookbook" practices, I am re-publishing as "Oldies But Goodies" material from the old DBDebunk.com (2000-06), Judge for yourself how well my arguments hold up and whether the industry has progressed beyond the misconceptions those arguments were intended to dispel. I may revise, break into parts, and/or add comments and/or references. You can acquire foundation knowledge by checking out our POSTS, BOOKS, PAPERS, LINKS (or, even better, organize one of our on-site SEMINARS, which can be customized to specific needs).

Slashing a Slashdot Exchange - Part 1

(first published @DBAzine.com in 2001)

I was recently contacted by a reporter for an interview. When I expressed my disappointment with the trade media’s tendency to regurgitate vendor marketing claims instead of  assessing them, he admitted "that is what happens about 98 percent of the time", but added "There are some outlets with a good piece from time to time that deal with serious architecture issues", mentioning SlashDot as one of them.

There is, of course, a Catch 22 here: to judge the seriousness of such outlets, foundation and substantive knowledge is necessary in the first place. And, alas, reporters possess even less of it than vendors and users (see, for example, The Ignorance Mechanism, On Trade Media’s "Balance"),
without which sources may appear serious even when they are nothing of the sort. As luck would have it, I ran into a good opportunity to prove this point for SlashDot. It so happened that shortly after my exchange with the journalist, Database Debunkings experienced a sudden ten-fold increase in traffic. Now, [given that my target audience is thinking practitioners,] were my material to suddenly become "hot", I would worry as to where I did go wrong. But the odds for that are rather slim and, fortunately, there was no need for concern: an email from a reader informed me that "there recently was an article posted to SlashDot.org which refers to Dbdebunk.com and Mr. Pascal/Date" and "There [were] some 443 comments to that posting." Such volume is practically always indicative of heat (hot air, to be more precise), rather than light. Ah, well, I thought, yet another source of weekly quotes (as if one was needed).

Note: To demonstrate the correctness and stability due to a sound theoretical foundation relative to the industry's fad-driven "cookbook" practices, I am re-publishing as "Oldies But Goodies" material from the old DBDebunk.com (2000-06), Judge for yourself how well my arguments hold up and whether the industry has progressed beyond the misconceptions those arguments were intended to dispel. I may revise, break into parts, and/or add comments and/or references. You can acquire foundation knowledge by checking out our POSTS, BOOKS, PAPERS, LINKS (or, even better, organize one of our on-site SEMINARS, which can be customized to specific needs).

“I did see your plea for help with funding Chris Date. Frankly, I think his approach is "dated", from what I could understand from talking to him at VLDB’99 in Edinburgh. We now live in a world of Agents, Semantic Web and XML. That is our main research focus here. Thus we would not be interested.”

--Sr. faculty, Academic Institution

“But within the context of the University of Washington, it would not be my classes where it would be appropriate to present that type of information [on fundamentals]. My classes are graduate level, highly technical and I don’t allow PowerPoint slides or any non-technical content.”

--Oracle practitioner, graduate teaching

“Recently, James H. Billington, the current Librarian of Congress, remarked that instead of a knowledge-based democracy, we may end up with an information-inundated democracy. I share his concern, so allow me to end with this simple wish. May, in spite of all distractions generated by technology, all of you succeed in turning information into knowledge, knowledge into understanding, and understanding into wisdom.”

--Edsger Dijkstra, Convocation Speech

 “A data model is a collection of concepts ... used to describe the structure of a database...data types, relationships and constraints...is basically a conceptualization between attributes and entities ...
The building blocks in the data model are as follows:

• Entity − An entity represents a particular type of object in the real world.
• Entity set − Sets of entities of the same type which share the same properties are called entity Sets.
• Attribute − An attribute is a characteristic of an entity.
• Constraints − A constraint is a restriction placed on the data. It is helpful to ensure data integrity.
• Relationship − A relationship describes an association among entities.

--TutorialsPoint.com

Fallacies, Misconceptions and Confusion

• A data model:

- does not describe (just) the structure of a database.
- is not "a conceptualization between attributes and entities" (whatever that means).

• Entities, entity sets and relationships are not building blocks of a data model.

“Let's say I want to store a list of movies that are stored on iTunes. For simplicity, we'll just store a few fields so that the film Avatar has these values:

ID: 354112018
Name: Avatar
Year: 2009
Synopsis: "From Academy Award®-winning director James Cameron comes Avatar, the story..."

However, sometimes the Synopsis is missing...and sometimes the Year is missing. Without giving it a second thought, I would probably create one table to store those four fields, something like this:

ID (INT)
Name (VARCHAR)
Year (INT NULL)
Synopsis (VARCHAR NULL)

Is there any advantage in 'further normalizing' the database so that, for example, I don't store any null values, such as:

Title
 TitleID
 Name

TitleSynopsis
 TitleID
 Synopsis

TitleYear
 TitleID
 Year

To me it seems like doing this would potentially create hundreds of extra tables (on a large database) and make inserts a nightmare -- I suppose a View could be created to flatten out the results so it's queryable, but even though I feel like it would require so much overhead. So is there any reason in the above case to normalize to remove nulls, or in general, what would be the case to do so, if there ever is one?”  --StackOverflow.com

Fallacies

That we see this in 2022 is testament to abysmal ignorance of fundamentals in the industry. Let's enumerate the fallacies:

Note: To demonstrate the correctness and stability offered by a sound theoretical foundation (relative to the industry's fad-driven "cookbook" practices), I am re-publishing as "Oldies But Goodies" material from the old (2000-06) DBDebunk.com, so that you can judge for yourself how well my arguments hold up and whether the industry has progressed beyond the misconceptions those arguments were intended to dispel. I may revise, break into parts, and/or add comments and/or references, which I enclose in square brackets).

Slashing a SlashDot Exchange Part 3

(first published in 2001 @DBazine.com)

The following comments being debunked are by the W3C XML Query Working Group's Activity Lead and by an academic. [The exchange took place when XML DBMS was one of the hottest fads as late as 2013.  Consider them in this context: where are XML DBMSs today?]

“The article seems to say ‘I don’t like SQL and I don’t like XML and I think XML Query is about merging them although I don’t understand it very well, so the people working on XML Query must be stupid, and in any case it’s easier to attack people than understand a specification.’ Perhaps that’s unfair, but it’s clear to me that the writer is a little fuzzy on the design goals of XML and also on the focus of SQL development over the past 10 or 15 years. In both cases the story is about interoperability.”

Note: To demonstrate the soundness and stability conferred by a sound theoretical foundation (relative to the industry's fad-driven "cookbook" practices), I am re-publishing as "Oldies But Goodies" material from the old (2000-06) DBDebunk.com, so that you can judge for yourself how well my arguments hold up and whether the industry has progressed beyond the misconceptions those arguments were intended to dispel. In re-publishing I may revise, break into or merge parts and/or add comments and/or references that I enclose in square brackets). 

One of the core objectives of this site (and my work) has been to demonstrate that there will not be progress in data management as long as the industry and trade media require and promote exclusively (mainly tool) experience in the absence of foundation knowledge. I have published and analyzed ample evidence that relational language and terminology are used without grasping what it actually means -- a good way to gauge lack of foundation knowledge.

Recently I posted a four part series titled "Nobody Understands the Relational Model" showing that even a practitioner steeped in the RDM does not really understand it. Consider now a practitioner's mistake at the beginning of career -- "a bad database schema and what it did to system performance" -- which, he claims, belatedly taught him a lesson. Hhhhmmm, did it, really?