Re: Way to go, David!

On Friday, May 30, 2003, at 09:59 AM, Josh Berkus wrote:

> I see the Reg gave you some nice publicity. Be prepared to fly to the
> UK a
> lot more in the future:
> http://theregister.co.uk/content/31/30959.html

Thanks, yeah, it's a great bit of PR. I've also updated the Kineticode
web site, and added a new section on support contracts, as well as a
link to the Reg article.

http://www.kineticode.com/

> On a different note, you made a statement at the end of the last
> meeting about
> being dissatisfied with RDBMSes in general. This troubles me; I'd
> like you
> to be happy with PostgreSQL and the relational model, given what a
> champion
> of it I am, and that we're considering Bricolage for some of the
> PostgreSQL
> sites.
>
> I often find that programmers become dissatisfied with RDBMSes because
> they
> are only using 10% of the RDBMS's functionality ... basically treating
> it as
> a high-powered disk object store rather than having the RDBMS do part
> of the
> work of the application. Would you be willing to discuss you
> specific beefs
> here, to see if our group can't find cures for some of them?

We intentionally kept Bricolage's SQL simple (mostly SQL-92) so that it
would be easily portable. So, yes, I use only a small percentage of its
functionality, but that's in the name of portability, mainly. My
annoyance with RDBMSs is I've written about in my use Perl journal:

http://use.perl.org/~Theory/journal/12028

In a word: They're a huge PITA for object-oriented design. "The
object/relational barrier is a well-known impedence mismatch," as Ziggy
noted in a comment on my entry, and that's the crux of the problem to
me. Make no mistake, PostgreSQL is hands-down my favorite database, but
I wrote that entry to be deliberately provocative. The relational model
is good for some things, but nothing that I do. So I want to challenge
people to come up with a better solution. I'm not optimistic.

Regards,

David

--
David Wheeler AIM: dwTheory
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