S
Silvio
What an odd thing to say. The whole point about relational databases is that
their structure is supposed to reflect the innate logical structure of the
data you’re dealing with—the actual semantics of your business app. To want
to abstract away from that would be to abstract away from the very details
of your business.
True. But there are classes of systems other than generic database
management tools for which a relational database is still a generic beast.
One group consists of standard software systems (in the sense of not
custom made and therefore generic) for things like reporting, analysis,
ETL, etc.
Another group consists of systems where users can define complex
entities that need to be (generically) transformed into relational
structures.
In my case users can define/design things like:
-research panels with user defined variable structures and portal user
interfaces
-research questionnaires/surveys where questions have to be mapped to on
screen representations as well as to data representations
-reports and reporting dashboards that have to be able to process data
from one of the above or from third party sources.
I do not only have to handle the RDBMS in a generic way. I use a generic
data access interface that could be mapped onto a RDBMS but in many
cases it can also be mapped to formats like SPSS, Triple-S, DBF, Excel,
CSV etc.
So it just depends on what you are doing.