Object/Relational Mapping is the Vietnam of Computer Science

[Eleanor McHugh]

Having read and enjoyed The Tao of Physics several times, I find
that I
rather like that response.

Perhaps someone needs to write The Tao of Informatics


Ellie

Eleanor McHugh
Games With Brains

 

[M. Edward (Ed) Borasky]

Perhaps someone needs to write The Tao of Informatics

When I was a very small boy, I was taught that the Chinese Taoists
invented the binary number system, and that the Yin-Yang symbol was part
of that whole system. Can someone here correct me if I'm wrong?

 

[Trans]

When I was a very small boy, I was taught that the Chinese Taoists
invented the binary number system, and that the Yin-Yang symbol was part
of that whole system. Can someone here correct me if I'm wrong?

IChing symbols use six binary marks. Perhaps you've seen these, For
example:

___ ___
_________
___ ___
___ ___
_________
_________


But I don't have any idea if they ever used these beyond enumeration,
ie. to do addition, multiplication etc.

T.

 

[Jimmy George]

When I was a very small boy, I was taught that the Chinese Taoists
invented the binary number system, and that the Yin-Yang symbol was part
of that whole system. Can someone here correct me if I'm wrong?

Taoism ["Way of Life"]
http://coolshack.com/martial_arts/taoism.html


Best Regards,
Jimmy George

 

[Chad Perrin]

Perhaps someone needs to write The Tao of Informatics

I'll let you know how that goes -- if I find the time, and if someone
else doesn't get to it first.

(Sorry about the delayed response. I was about 1000 miles away from
home when this email arrived.)

 

[James Edward Gray II]

I actually love OODBs, and having worked for a major vendor in that
space, would consider myself knowledgeable in that arena.

Would you care to share any favored links for reading of why OODBs
are a good thing, for those of us who don't know any better?

James Edward Gray II

 

[Luciano Ramalho]

Actually the I Ching is much older than Taoism. But it is certainly
the first recorded use of a binary notation. "The Mandate of Heaven"
is a wonderful book about the history of the I Ching. BTW, the most
popular translations of the I Ching to Western languages (Legge's and
Willhelm's) today are considered really bad. Try Kerson Huang's (he is
native Chinese, but is also an MIT physics professor).

Do look further into it as it is a fascinating topic.

Cheers,

Luciano

 

[Trans]

Actually the I Ching is much older than Taoism. But it is certainly
the first recorded use of a binary notation. "The Mandate of Heaven"
is a wonderful book about the history of the I Ching. BTW, the most
popular translations of the I Ching to Western languages (Legge's and
Willhelm's) today are considered really bad. Try Kerson Huang's (he is
native Chinese, but is also an MIT physics professor).

Do look further into it as it is a fascinating topic.

Cheers,

Thanks Luciano. Good info.

T.

 

[Benjohn Barnes]

Anyone have any comments / experience with "associative" databases
like:
http://www.associativesolutions.com/relavance.php
http://www.lazysoft.com/technology_sentences.htm

Well, it looks interesting so far, thanks. Nice to look at something
new! There's a free book PDF at the second link (here we go...). The
points that the author makes seem to align with some of my own
thoughts, so he's either a good salesman, or he's on to something, or
I've poorly analysed the problems I see around me.

 

[Benjohn Barnes]

I'd never heard of these. The marketing speak sounds like hooey, and
Fabian Pascal quite agrees. Fabian Pascal is, if you will, the Richard
Dawkins of databases. He knows what the hell he's talking about, but
he's an abrasive man who often hurts his own points by his
abrasiveness. Here's three articles:

http://www.dbdebunk.com/page/page/622443.htm
http://www.dbdebunk.com/page/page/622368.htm
http://www.dbdebunk.com/page/page/3278346.htm

I suspect that these are to be heavily avoided in favour of properly
educating oneself about relational data models.

Mr. Pascal is really very abrasive!

I've read those three articles now. In general, I'd agree with his
venting - certainly his criticism of people writing about problems in
the relation model / confusing logical with physical, and idiot
marketing speak.

From the little look I've had, this associative stuff sounds
interesting though. I suspect that associative's marketers have gone
out and talked rubbish, and this has obscured any value that might be
in it.

So I'll go and read more about it now.

Cheers,
Benj

 

[brabuhr]

Anyone have any comments / experience with "associative" databases

Well, it looks interesting so far, thanks. Nice to look at something
new! There's a free book PDF at the second link (here we go...). The
points that the author makes seem to align with some of my own
thoughts, so he's either a good salesman, or he's on to something, or
I've poorly analysed the problems I see around me.

"(There aren't many of them out there, only one other 'real'
implementation of one that I know of exists anywhere, which is
Sentences by LazySoft. I'll bring it up again, because Relavance
is not like Sentences for a lot of reasons and I'll get into those a bit
later.)"

http://davedolan.com/blog/2006/06/28/just-when-things-are-starting-to-solidify-for-me/

 

[Benjohn Barnes]

What is Google's most valuable asset? Not data. They recreate their
data constantly.

From what?

 

[Joel VanderWerf]

From what?

Data. Other people's data. Other people's assets. Good business to be in.

 

[Eleanor McHugh]

I'll let you know how that goes -- if I find the time, and if someone
else doesn't get to it first.

(Sorry about the delayed response. I was about 1000 miles away from
home when this email arrived.)

Hmm... that's about where my brain is right now. Too much Rails
coding, too little time


Ellie

Eleanor McHugh
Games With Brains

 

[Giles Bowkett]

Even if OO databases are flawed, I'd rather be able to think OO, store

OO, and model things as OO. Yeah, maybe a Smalltalk guy can help.

I'm not really qualified to say for sure one way or the other, but I
do know Smalltalk guys love OO DBs, and a friend of mine told me that
some significant trading systems run on Gemstone (an OODB with a
pretty strong historical association with Smalltalk).

This was actually a major interest of mine pretty recently, but I got
wrapped up in a bunch of distractions and real-life stuff. If you
really want to explore OODBs, the thing to do is not use Ruby, as far
as I know, but instead use Squeak Smalltalk, the Seaside web
framework, and Squeak's open source OODB Magma.

 

[Giles Bowkett]

He knows what the hell he's talking about, but

And what about those of use who don't speak out of ignorance and
STILL don't like relational DBs??? Or would you just assume we're
ignorant too???

And I thought I wouldn't touch this topic with a 10 foot pole... I
generally won't touch a thread that is one of your hot topics because
it just isn't worth it (see your comment about Pascal above). You
entered this thread as abusively as you could, pretty much on par
with all your other hot topic threads. I think you do a lot of good
work, but this regrettably makes pretty much most of it unapproachable.

Unfortunately this is true. Matz is nice so we are nice. Abusiveness
and bad manners are inappropriate.

 

[Mark T]

(e-mail address removed) of LadyBridge..... wrote back to me on
the topic of using
OpenQM with Ruby.

OpenQM is a multi-field database based on Pick/Universe/Everyone...
"OpenQM uses the post-relational model in which the First Law of
Normalisation is discarded, allowing multiple values such as a list of
products in an order to be stored together."

He said if Ruby can do cgi-bin, then it can access the OpenQM DB.
Intriguing.
On this page there is a clue to access techniques:
http://www.openqm.com/id57.htm

Q: When you put this against node-xml access, does xml imply it also
discards the First Law?
A: http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2002/11/13/normalizing.html

Markt

 

[Edwin Fine]

Unfortunately this is true. Matz is nice so we are nice. Abusiveness

and bad manners are inappropriate.

Maybe so, but IMHO directness is often interpreted as abusiveness or bad
manners. I personally appreciate Austin's directness, and that of many
others (although it would probably sting if it were me on the receiving
end Then again, I usually try very hard to do my research before I
post a (technical) opinion. Sometimes I post in haste and get slammed; I
usually deserve it.

Some very smart or successful (or both) people were and are considered
by many to be rude or abusive (for example, Theo de Raadt, Charles
Babbage, Eric Raymond, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Richard Stallman).
I'm sure there are many reasons for this; still, one thought is that
people like these get incredibly frustrated by receiving opinions that
are not based on much (or any) due diligence, and questions that have
been asked (and answered) a million times and are usually easy (or at
least possible) to find using Google. One's patience would imaginably
wear very thin when the signal to noise ratio of posts or emails is
regularly low. Then again, sometimes people *are* just plain rude.

Bottom line is, I agree with ESR:

"Much of what looks like rudeness in hacker circles is not intended to
give offense. Rather, it's the product of the direct,
cut-through-the-bullshit communications style that is natural to people
who are more concerned about solving problems than making others feel
warm and fuzzy."

My 2c.

 

[Clifford Heath]

Anyone have any comments / experience with "associative" databases like:
http://www.associativesolutions.com/relavance.php
http://www.lazysoft.com/technology_sentences.htm

Ooooh, Omnicompetent programming, that must be good... Application feature
partitioning... sort of like schema access rights... What a lot of mumbo-
jumbo.

Data is as useful as it is trustworthy and unambiguous. If you build a DBMS
that allows you to stash facts without having to think about what they mean
and under what conditions they mean it, and to avoid constraining them so
only such facts can be stored, it becomes a nice way to build a personal
filofax, or any other system where a human must do all the interpretation,
but it's a completely useless way to build a software application. If a
developer likes such a system and finds it works well, it's because s/he
believes that all constraints on the data structure should be hidden inside
the application code. I think you can make up your own mind about whether
that is smart....

That said, these tools are actually seeking after a holy grail... how to
allow us to store facts in the same structure in which we think of them,
but retain the efficiency and transaction reliability of traditional tools.

A direct approach to this problem is already well-understood in the form
of fact-based modeling. Austin would like it, as it's a hyper-normalised
relational form, yet it can be invisibly mapped to an efficient relational
and transactional storage structure, leaving the queries against the user
friendly fact-based schema. It truly is time that this technology leaves
the academic domain where three decades of work have yielded nothing but a
few CASE tools, and finds its home in the heart of a dynamic development
environment like Ruby... It's because I believe this that I've left my job
of 17 years, in a company I co-founded, to build the ActiveFacts project
for Rubyists everywhere. My last day is Friday . Really. I almost can't
believe it myself . I've allocated myself 6 weeks full-time to build a
credible first release.

If anyone wants more information on fact-based modelling, take a look at
www.orm.net, http://www.casetalk.com, http://sourceforge.com/projects/orm,
www.objectrolemodeling.com, or some of the other sites they point to. Or
join the new Yahoo information_modeling mailing list. Please Austin, find
the time to look at it. Terry Halpin's book "Information Modeling and
Relational Databases" will be proved to be one of this century's most
influential works.

Clifford Heath.

 

[Eleanor McHugh]

Bottom line is, I agree with ESR:

"Much of what looks like rudeness in hacker circles is not intended to
give offense. Rather, it's the product of the direct,
cut-through-the-bullshit communications style that is natural to
people
who are more concerned about solving problems than making others feel
warm and fuzzy."

It is possible to be both polite and terse, but the effort required
is often much higher than that required to do some basic fact-
checking with Google. Each time someone fires off an ill-considered
opinion based on fashion, marketing hype or religious predilection
they're effectively polluting our shared intellectual space, and yet
somehow it's those who suffer this on a daily basis who're the
offensive ones...


Ellie

Being and Doing are merely useful abstractions for the 'time'-
dependent asymmetries of phase space.