Re: relational for what? [was: Design Principles Behind Smalltalk, Revisited]

>From: "David T. Lewis" <lewis <at> mail.msen.com>
>Reply-To: The general-purpose Squeak developers 
>list<squeak-dev <at> lists.squeakfoundation.org>
>To: The general-purpose Squeak developers 
>list<squeak-dev <at> lists.squeakfoundation.org>
>Subject: Re: relational for what? [was: Design Principles Behind 
>Smalltalk,Revisited]
>Date: Thu, 4 Jan 2007 00:26:40 -0500
>
>Quite right from an engineering perspective. But "proven track-record
>and no surprises" is wrong, at least in the context of the larger
>organizations for which RDBMS are considered appropriate. This has
>very little to do with technology, mathematics, or engineering, and
>lots to do with organizational behavior. An RDBMS scales extremely
>well, but the human organizations associated with them do not.

Well that's true.  The worst things I have seen in my career in this context 
were

1) DA's who apply silly standards to every table no matter what.  We had 
some data that happen to have strings in it (the host names of computers), 
but since it was a string the DA's wanted us to break the string out to 
another table(s) so that we could internationalize our application.  No 
matter how we explained it they just replied with the "Data standards" 
document.

2) Developers (and by this I mean: The kind of person who probably uses Java 
and only knows the OO that Java has) who inflict their will on the tables.  
This is probably where most of the horror stories come from.   Either the 
table was designed by them from the start, or they gradually made 
modifications to it that fit their world view.  I have seen some pretty 
awful results from this one.

>One lesson that I take from Squeak is that the way people interact
>with technology is important. It does not matter whether or not
>Squeak is "fast" if it helps people to work with ideas and solve
>problems quickly. More broadly, it does not matter if a technology
>(RDBMS or whatever) scales well if it leads people and organizations
>to behave as disfunctional groups of "architects," "data analysts,"
>and so forth.

Agreed.

>p.s. Ralph Johnson's earlier reply on this thread is an excellent
>assessment, and would serve well as the last word on the topic.
>My sincere apologies for indulging in a further reply ;)

Agreed.

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