Re: Fabian Pascal and RDBMS deficiencies in fully

On Fri, Jun 09, 2006 at 09:54:56AM -0700, dananrg(at)yahoo(dot)com wrote:
> Lots of great conversation here. Thanks to all for participating.
>
> David, you wrote:
> >Be aware that Pascal, along with Date and Darwen, are...how do I put
> >this gently...cranks. They've been getting more strident and
> >irrational as the decades go by.
>
> I can't speak to that statement directly. Indirectly, however, the
> sources Pascal cites in the body of the text (if I had to guess, and I
> do because I'm too lazy to count them all) seem to be ~90% works by
> C.J. Date. So it seems chiefly to be a distillation of Date's ideas,
> e.g. potentially a cloistered treatise.

Good eye :)

> Is Pascal an academic who doesn't have real world knowledge gained
> from having logically and physically designed, then brought to
> production, monitored, refined, and tuned databases, and has
> answered to end users, for a wide variety of customers and projects?

Yes.

> Is there a good book out there about DB design written *by*
> real-world practitioners, *for* real-world practitioners that
> addresses Pascal and Date's concerns, yet focuses on the technology
> we have to live with today? Something vendor-neutral if possible.

Any random book by Joe Celko is pretty good on this, especially the
recent ones. Celko was on the committee that did the SQL92
standard--the last one in EBNF, alas--and has been out in the trenches
for decades. He knows about mathematics and frequently cites math
papers :)

Cheers,
D
--
David Fetter <david(at)fetter(dot)org> http://fetter.org/
phone: +1 415 235 3778 AIM: dfetter666
Skype: davidfetter

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