Slashdot Mirror
Ask Database Guru Brian Aker
Brian Aker is Director of Architecture for MySQL AB. He has also worked on the code (and database) that runs Slashdot, and is well-known in both Apache and Perl circles. Outside of the arcane world of open source "back-end" programming, though, hardly anyone has heard of him. This is your chance to ask Brian (hopefully after looking at his blog and Wikipedia listing) about anything you like, from Perl to database architecture to open source philosophy to upcoming events in Seattle. We'll send Brian 10 of the highest-moderated questions approximately 24 hours after this post appears. His (verbatim) answers will appear late this week or early next week.
Are you ever tempted to throw away your open source development position for a possibly much higher paid closed source development position? If so, how do you cope with living in a capitalistic society and not taking advantage of (or even seeking for that matter) higher paying opportunities?
I mean, come on, you can't tell me you've never been offered more money (although probably a lower position) at another company. What 'keeps' you at MySQL AB?
My work here is dung.
its not a matter of tabular vs hierarchal, its Relational vs Object based (or some such).
Basically the short answer is that the relational model has had much more time and more people working on it to mature, and a move to a different system as mainstream would have a totally insane impact on the workflow of enterprise level software development, from functional analysis to all the echosystem of tools to design and maintain applications...
On top of that, object databases are amazingly fast for quick CRUD and for hierarchal data, but when you want to do datamining, reporting, etc, its a total disaster (relational sucks at it too, thus OLAP systems that plugs in them, but thats a minority of softwares that use em, and at least relational has workarounds, such as star schemas).
Basically: It will become that way eventually (major RDBMSs like SQL Server and Oracle already have or are working on hybrid engines), but such a core change in software development paradigms takes time. Its like if you tried to mainstream a non-Object-Oriented programming language... it will take a long time. Still, has uses for niches and such.
Until then, there's ORM tools like Hibernate to bridge the concepts. And of course, there ARE douzans of Object data engines on the market...just pick. Its just not as well supported by the echosystem.
Any intentions of implementing any of C.J. Date's Third Manifesto proposals for implementing the new generation of relational databases? If not, why?
The bitter lessons of a veteran coder: http://bitterprogrammer.blogspot.com
This really shouldn't be a function of the RDBMS. If you wanted such a thing writing a driver wrapper for any RDBMS should be fairly easy. However, coding your database mappings without locking down your feature set is kinda useless. What's more interesting is creating scripts to generate your database schema from your code. It's been done, see Hibernate.
I'd really prefer to ask an open question. I like to hear about things that I don't already know about.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org