Slashdot Mirror
Fabian Pascal Reacts
Kardamon writes "Fabian Pascal reacts on the recent Slashdot discussion about SQL, XML, and the Relational Database Model, both on DBAzine and on his own web site Database Debunkings. An Open Source implementation of his ideas and those of C.J. Date and Hugh Darwen is REL."
Oracle et al have spent decades optimizing their products for SQL as they implement it. The chances of a better designed syntax resulting in a faster database is slim. I don't give REL or any other SQL++ contender much chance at this point, if even on the legacy argument alone.
Like most around here I do not reply to news articles often, however the passion of Mr Pascal really has forced me to. Sadly Mr Pascal really does not understand how the medium of /. really works. Before being linked to by /. Mr Pascal doesn't realize that for most of the IT population he was like the rest of us, and probably will end up like that again.. Nobody of importance except in our own minds. As well given the traffic of /. we all realize that he also only received a minor interest compared to many many other posts which received a huge amount of response compared to the piddly 443 replies.
What is worse is that while he preaches his background living through harder times than the rest of us, and relying on his univeristy training making him smarter than the rest of us. He writes or claims to write works of constructive critisim and yet cannot respond to a critique of his work other than paultry name calling (paraphrase)'your all idiots!!'
It is easy as I've shown to critise someone/something, it is difficult to provide suggestions of improvement. May I suggest that before you start name calling you consider how your overly defensive behavior has tarnished your name. /. writes what it writes, virtually unmoderated, no propiganda involved. If your bringing something to the table, consider yourself marginalized.
The main concern of fabian is how a language defined for cross platform syntax representation in general (XML), is used for a model that is, by nature, semantic.
His argument is impecable cause the shortcommings of a subset of XML, made to mimic SQL and SQL mistakes is not really an advancement, except to help close the gap between RDBMS's SQL implementations.
But, there is a language out there that can fully represent the relational model. Its called RDF and a subset of it can be serialized into XML. So maybe the question we should be asking is Is that subset of RDF enough to implement the relational model?
Cause, if it is, then kill XQUERY and use RDF-XML and alas, the best of both worlds (XML ubiquity plus RDF semantic strenght) is what we can use.
NO SIG
Exactly right. Anonymous writings can even sometimes be more effective that signed writings because you are not reading them with some preconceived notion of who the author is and what his/her biases are. However, this only holds as long as the piece sticks to independently verifiable evidence and reasoned argument. Anonymous allegations with no proof or simple personal invective may be safely ignored. But simply dismissing one's opponent solely on the basis of anonymity (or, more often at Slashdot pseduonymity) is just lazy. Note: I am not a database expert, and I have no particular knowledge of the issues in this debate. But you'll just have to trust me on that ;)
The one difference is that the "control" in the US is usually less centralized and the source of control shifts with time.
If you really want to find out about abuses in propaganda, google on George Creel - who probably picked up a few lessons from William Randolph Hearst's conduct just prior to the Spanish American War. I wouldn't be surprised if the Soviets picked up a few tidbits from Creel's work.
It is also interesting that Pascal did not mention Orwell's 1984 which is the classic description of propaganda in action. That story is becoming especially spooky with reports of the UK having the largest scale deployment of public surveillance cameras.
A Shadeless room is a brighter room.
The XML community seems to be largely devoid of any knowledge of history or computer science depth. I have yet to find a description of XML schema processing in terms of grammars and parsers. The brain damaged SAX parser has become popular, while few know about the XmlPullParser. Since many of those who use XML parsers don't seem to have ever parsed anything else, they do not seem to find it odd that the scanner should call the parser, rather than the other way around.
Perhaps this lack of computer science depth is due to the fact that XML grew out of the dot-com bubble, when people felt they had no time to design or think about much. Just get it out the door. It was also during this time that the field was flooded with people who had not necessarily studied computer science.
I think you've misunderstood something. The idea behind Stored Procedures is that you offload the data processing onto the server (which is much, much more powerful, presumably) and you don't have to transmit huge amounts of data to the client. The usefulness of SPs has nothing to do with the efficiency of SQL as such, it's more about relative processing power and infrastructure.
HAND.
Insisting on separating technology from politics doesn't sound insightful to me, it sounds myopic, futile and absurd at best.
Look at P2P, the GPL, copyleft, freedom of information, encryption, freedom of association, control of the press, international data exchange, border controls, biometrics, GPS, satellite transmissions. These and many, many other standard news items are precisely about the intersection of politics and technology and that's just in IT. Let's not even start on biology and physics.
Anyway, the issue with Fabian Pascal is not poltical really, it's personal. He takes the comments made about him personally and he wears his ego on his sleeve.
Relational databases aren't enough, either. When you find yourself putting columns of serial numbers in tables so you can link tables together, the relational model isn't fitting the problem.
Clearly, you do not know what a relational database is. You, like many others, are simply the grist for Pascal's mill.
You don't link tables (or relation variables). A relational database management system should give you a rich enough type system so that you can use whatever attributes necessary in a tuple to uniquely identify entities. You should be able to use composite keys without any limitations or worries about space. A good RDBMS would be able to do whatever physical linking and space saving necessary in the physical backend layer to accommodate foreign key relationships with composite keys.
In, many cases when people do this they find that working with composite keys is cumbersome and they blame the relational database. This is kind of interesting phenomenon and conclusion. In fact, it has nothing to do with relational databases (at least in the electronic sense).
The use of surrogate keys long predate electronic data storage systems. Prisons have used numbers for inmates, cars have used license plate numbers, and the SSN was established, long before Codd wrote his seminal papers.
So I don't see what adding columns of serial numbers has to do with a failing of the relational model. The use of "serial" numbers in general has to do with the difficulty of finding good, stable, unique identifiers for entities of interest.
As for times when you NEED tree based data (which is actually less common than most people think). A common mistake is to look at something like an org chart and think that this should be codified as a simple tree, when in reality the tree itself is a physical report that can be derived from more explicit base data. Anyway, I don't see why linking tables can't use the explicit base data in foreign key relationships.
One of the problems of the RDBMS products today and in part the fault of SQL is that "tables" or relvars are WAY to heavyweight. In a true RDBMS a relvar is a fundamental variable much like local variables in a C function. The relvar should be able to referenced in arbitrary expressions with no silly ordered syntax like SQL. Relvar literals should be easy to define in expressions. A "link table" shouldn't be such a heavyweight object in the minds of a database designer. Because of the highly restrictive way SQL works, "Tables" get an overblown status as some kind of special object that makes things like tree data very difficult to work with. This is a failing of the RDBMS products on the market today, not relational model.
Any good RDBMS implementation would have necessary functions to make dealing with tree data easy, or the language would be general enough that they could be defined anyway.
The difference between Fabian Pascal and the truly enlightened is that the while both have come to the same conclusion that the masses are asses, the latter knows there's nothing that can be done about it, and no point in bitching about it either
Actually I do respect Fabian Pascal, and I am not really bashing him for his diatribes. I can't see how his behavior is any more of a waste of time than, say, posting on slashdot. I just hope that he actually ENJOYS running his website and is actually not as wound up as he sounds in his rants. In other words, if he is sort of like a maddox of the data fundamentals world I guess that's a good thing. If he really is this concerned about the state of the world constantly then he really could use some professional therapy or counseling.
Also, Fabian Pascal is way to impatient. The Codd material only came out about 30 or so years ago. That is not a long time for these things to materialize into usage by the mainstream engineering field. Couple this with the fact that the overwhelming perception is that many things in this field are "good enough."
Most tables HAVE a primary key in them somewhere. It is just a matter of getting the data in there or making sure it is designed correctly. Why put a monotomicly increasing number? It makes for a 'easy' primary key. Also computers do not think in "Somelastname, SomeFirstname". They are basicaly super calculators. They LOVE integers.
Lets do a 'C' example
int x = 1;
int y = 1;
if (x == y) {//do some work}
OR we could do this
char *pX = "SomeString";
char *pY = "SomeString";
if (strcmp(pX,pY)) {// do some work}
Now do this same operation 300000 times? Which will finish faster?
Do not forget the FOUNDATION of the computer you are working on. While data purity is nice. It sometimes sucks for speed... Computer Science is not about 'best design' it is about 'best fit'. Sometimes you have to stand on your head and rub your belly to make it finish in a reasonable time frame.
I do agree with many of his arguments though. There are serious issues. But all he does in those articals is poke holes. I think he needs to show fixes too. The 'I may not know art but I know what I like' argument does not fly long in a discussion.
I also went and read the previous artical. I think he missed the REASON XML is getting a relational bolt on. People need to agrigate the data in the XML tables. Most SQL servers (Oracle, mysql, MSSQL, etc) are 'disconnected' from the program itself. You have to jump through a few hoops to get the data into the format you need. And it is usually in the form of ODBC which bites big time. Then once it finaly comes out of the DB you have to re process the data into a form you can use. XML is solving that little problem nicely but it is creating all new ones...
Also his reasoning for disliking XML because it is 'fat' is a good reason. Once the format is 'done' you do not need extra formating. However debugging XML is probably much easier as we humans need to read it...
Its the same for a DB design who doesn't use forieng keys, or views, or constraints.
Foreign keys and constraints, sure, but I don't see the amazing cant-live-without usefulness of views... they're basically just stored queries, and if your frontend is generating the SQL (i.e: it's not you typing it in every day), how is a view really all that useful?
Yes, it is exactly that side of Pascal's persona (the Chomskyite side) that makes it so hard to see the value of his real accomplishments. Those he can't convince are automatically members of the mindless free-market apparatchik, and those he can convince are the brave but pitiable few who will be ground up and spit out by the soulless machine of modern commerce. Either way, you lose, it seems; and I think Pascal somehow wants it to be that way.
Note that if you are one of the people out there who actually makes a habit of approaching new ideas with interest, and happen to be convinced by the logical arguments he makes (as I did, before I was distracted by all the politics and personality), you will probably be quite disappointed if you send any note of actual encouragement to him. The response almost always takes a negative tack.
Quite unfortunate, really. While I think the objective truth of the phenomemon he talks about happens quite often (marginalized by a conventional-thinking public, etc...), there is no great conspiracy here. There are just people deciding what they want to deal with and what they don't. I was a geek in high school. I know what it is like to be shunned by the popular crowd, and to inwardly seethe at their shallow cultivated ignorance. Most poeple prefer mediocrity. The job of any great thinker or artist is to help people see a way past mediocrity, but that can't be done by force. And it really can't be done if you hate or despise those you are trying to convince. Unfortunately, the downside of a democracy is that people might do and think things you don't like. Thus, the only way to... get your way is to convince people agreeably. Even if you are right, forcing people to agree with you is wrong. But maybe Pascal disagrees. Maybe we should have some sort of utopian socialism ruled by the intelligentsia (do the 'intelligentsia' ever conceive of it any other way?). Yes, and then the government can appoint Pascal a seat on the National Education Board, or something like that, which will lay down the 'guidelines' about what will be taught in the schools and universities. I can see the exhaustive tests and questionnaires that every computer science professor will have to fill out. And of course the appropriate punishments will have to be meted out in order to silence dissent on this matter. But of course this will have to be done, because a free market (for money OR ideas) will lead some to ignore the obviously true principles of logic, thus allowing some to have wrong conjectures, and intellectual anarchy will result!
See the essential dichotomy of Pascal's argument here? On the one side, he lauds anyone with the mental self-reliance to escape the Trap of Commercialized Education, but on the other side, he decries a system that allows people to make up their own minds about what they will buy, do with their lives, and ultimately, believe (if I correctly read between the lines on his many comments about education). As if somehow people are powerless to make up their own minds in anything.
Oh, and read Paul Johnson's Intellectuals for a glimpse at the world of Noam Chomsky and other great minds of the past 2 centuries. Quite revealing in how these people are so willing to sacrifice real people for the sake of their theoretical constructs. Why do so many intellectuals, great in one very specific area of endeavor, think that somehow qualifies them to judge every other area of life?