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."
Assuming that a Slashdot 'debate' actually is one.
Okay Fabian needs to relax. Take a deep breath! He made two fundamental mistakes which probably cost him to waste time he could have spent on something more productive, or at least personally gratifying... (Although bitching about Slashdot posts can be gratifying, I suppose.)
/another/ warning to all future Slashdotees -- People hidden behind anonymity, even experienced onces, like drivers, will forget that there are real people on the other side of the conversation.
/start/ thinking about a problem, not where they would end up after careful consideration after research and practice.
1. He took Slashdot comments personally. This is something we see all the time. Let this serve as
2. He treats Slashdot comments as well-thought responses to his articles. For Pete's sake come on! This is the place where professionals, interested parties, and random wannabes can foam at the mouth and say the first thing that comes to mind. Hell man, comments are moderated by popular vote! This is not exactly a medium of high academic quality. And that's just fine. Sometimes first impressions are what you want, sometimes they're complete BS, but they only give you an insight in to where some people would
In the end Fabian, you're probably gonna get flamed for your response as well. If you want it for the intention, cool. If not you should probably just let it go...
For example, I've done a search on Google for my own name, and found that there are several other people in the US who share my name. One is a preacher in Florida. Another is a lawyer in Pennsylvania. I don't even have all that common of a name.
What about my cousin, named David Evans? Evans is a common last name (at least for those of Welsh extraction), and david isn't exactly a rare first name. How many "David Evans" might post at a site as popular as Slashdot?
I'm sorry, but to dismiss someone (and their arguments) as cowardly because they use a screen name or user account is to ignore the substance of their remarks. If he were really interested in accepting constructive criticism and improving his ideas, he would not be ridiculing those who comment on them.
and can summarize it for you. :)
He basically makes the point that everyone on slashdot is a clueless twit.
A very wise man indeed.
also ignore my .sig
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
Mr. Pascal seems to be quite the cunning-linguist.
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.
While this "article" is rambling, and realtively incoherent, I will agree with him on one thing: the average Slashdot user knows *nothing* about data. Any time a database discussion crops up, every PHP and PERL hack comes out of the woorkwork describing the wonderful spped at which MySQL handles a "select *" query. I personally feel that any database that is large enough or complex enough to have a DBA should limit access to it to only people who have had a basic "what is a database" class that explains what a relational database is, how it works, the basic history behind it, and specific basics such as stored procedures, triggers, views, foreign keys, etc. I can't begin to count the number of completely ignorant postings I've seen on /. regarding data. Hell, most people treat the database as an afterthought when designing an application, when, in reality, it should almost always be the *first* consideration.
I don't respond to AC's.
I also read the article. My summary is as follows:
Fabian Pascal is a twit.
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.
When someone calls you a Communist in a dismissive manner on a bulletin board, that signifies that you have won the argument. It's a variant of the classic "Comparison to Nazis/Hitler" BBS rule. The people arguing against Paschal unleashed the dirty C word on him as their defense, hence they lost the argument. There's no need to defend yourself against it! =)
-Vendal Thornheart
Politics + Programming = GNU
It is the perfect combination. Politics and Sex on the other hand... baaad combination.
My Blog
Heck, everyone knows that SQL was a mistake and that XML was an even bigger mistake. Merging the two seems like compounding both mistakes.
And, at the same time, most of us know that SQL and XML are pretty good at something, and it'll be a long while before someone develops a compelling alternative.
So the news here is that Fabian Pascal doesn't like some ideas, and to be honest, I don't like some ideas too. He doesn't have to provide alternatives to unloved ideas. I think that's OK.
I worked with a woman who was damned sure that she was going to store a copy of my relational database (Postgres) in her XML database. It sounded like a bad technical idea. I didn't like it, and I expressed that I didn't like it without proposing an alternative that would work with her application. Isn't that OK?
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
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.
Pascal makes a number of interesting points, although he does himself a disservice by wasting energy engaging some of the people here who probably were more interested in pushing his buttons than having a productive discussion. He does illuminate an ever-growing trend where acerbic, personalized, condemning rhetoric is perceived as an alternative to actual substance.
This really bothers me. Everyone's welcome to criticize, but NOT everyone's opinion is equal (IMO). Take a person like Robert X. Cringely, who every other month has a goofy idea about how to get rid of spam, when his main experience with it is as your typical e-mail user and not a network administrator. His opinion pales in comparison to that of someone who is down in the trenches and has more experience and depth of knowledge. Unfortunately, Cringely and his bone-headed schemes get more attention than other, much-more-credible and much-more-realistic ideas proposed by those who have demonstrated that they are part of the necleus of the issue, as opposed to some journalist who's job is merely to regurgitate press releases and manufacture titillating bylines.
We have a new breed of "experts" which aren't really experts in any field other than caustic communication.
Mr. Pascal has a long and distinguished career and has been a visible pioneer in this industry. Perhaps his critics have equally illustrious careers involving the development of adult porn password databases, Starbucks employee management, kissing TA ass and other equally relevant disciplines that, when coupled with some clever put-downs compensate for a grand-canyon-sized disparity in real-world wisdom.
Everyone's opinion is worth mentioning, but if you're going to dis someone like Pascal, you better open your fly and whip your own dick out and prove it's bigger.
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."
Did you even bother reading his article and the previous discussion?
He mentions his origins because that's what stupid slashdotters attacked him on last time.
Arr somebody mentioned, he came from romania. I have not grown up in a socialist country (unless you agree with good ole Arnold the Governator, actually living here was more free than in many other countries)
But giving the almost non existend distance I already met a bunch of romanian people. Believe me if you made it up to the age of 13 you probably had a harder life than most people up until the age of 65 in other countries. The country really was fucked up in many regards, with a totalitarian neo Cesar on top of it. If there ever was a European big brother like country, probably Romania would have deserved the title.
But back to the other quote, have you ever spent a a thought about following that in the US you constantly here how good this country is, that it is the best to live in the world at least ten times a day in variations, no matter how f**** things are. Probably the guys in Vietnam and noq Iraq hear/heard it also every day on the US radio, television etc... while bleeding to death in the sand / or were bleeding to death in the jungle.
Great that the government and the country is so great, while the government has a serious pribe problem, with legalized bibe with the face of electional donations etc... Given this guy is heavily sensitive to this issues, I am glad he speaks out openly.