Re: Relational Systems set back DP

While Mr. Baker makes some very interesting - and valid - points about what relational databases are *in fact*, there are a couple of points with which I take exception. He writes: > As a designer of commercial manufacturing applications on IBM mainframes in > the late 1960s and early 1970s, I can categorically state that relational > databases _set the data processing industry back at least ten years_ and > wasted many of the billions of dollars that were spent on data processing. This frankly sounds like the diatribe of a dyed-in-the-wool Data Processing Guru lamenting over the loss of power to desktop-based systems. I would not begin to disagree with his point that relational databases are, from a technical standpoint, outmoded and obsolete. However, the point Mr. Baker misses is the tremendous good that has been accomplished by moving database storage to the "everyman's desktop" and providing virtually unlimited power to access that data through techniques such as relational database manipulation via SQL, etc. > With the recent arrival of object-oriented databases, the industry may > finally achieve some of the promises which were made 20 years ago about the > capabilities of computers to automate and improve organizations. True. But let's not forget that _object-oriented languages_ are, in terms of the last 20 years, still quite new! How, then, can we lament over the lack of progress in moving to object-oriented databases when programmers are still adapting to object-oriented languages? What tripe. Given the volatility of the marketplace and the need of business to adapt to that marketplace in a flexible but conservative manner, no other outcome was possible - or needed. Mr. Baker goes on to make an obscure and irrelevant reference to biological systems, perhaps in an attempt to persuade us all that he is, after all, an avowed expert at so many things that we could not possibly begin to have the gall to disagree with him, and then proceeds to smear the entire industry over the fact that someone had the foresight to develop a system (whether using a mathematical metaphor or not) which provided a strong conceptual base from which a _better way_ of manipulating data could be achieved. Not the best way, certainly, but in terms of the then-available methods of accessing databases, it was an unparalleled achievement. It is indeed unfortunate that Mr. Baker feels the need to smear the entire database industry because it developed in ways which he would have preferred that it had not. > Unfortunately, relational databases performed a task that did not need > doing: e.g., these databases were orders of magnitude slower than the "flat > files" they replaced, and they could not begin to handle the requirements > of real-time transaction systems. This statement is simply not true. Relational databases did perform a necessary function: they made it possible for non-programmers (i.e., businesspersons) and programmer-novices to manipulate data in ways which had heretofore been impossible to them. So what if performance dropped below theoretical norms? The power of the computer had been moved to the desktop, and the world hasn't been the same since! Most of the industry requirements *at this level* had nothing whatever to do with real-time transaction processing. Of course, the requirements for real-time transaction processing still existed and do exist today, but to focus on those requirements alone is to miss a large part of the boat. > In mathematical parlance, they made trivial problems _obviously_ trivial, > but did nothing to solve the really hard data processing problems. in fact, > the advent of relational databases made the hard problems harder, because > the application engineer now had to convince his nontechnical management > that the relational database had no clothes. Talk about "having no clothes"! Since when is a programmer an "application engineer"? Shall we now call ditch diggers "tubular earth manipulation engineers"? And since when does the "application engineer", i.e., programmer take on the job of convincing his nontechnical management of this kind of problem? What happened to the systems analyst whose job it is to *find* the best solution to a problem of this sort, and who is paid by the nontechnical managers *precisely* to make the right recommendations? > I shudder to think about the large number of man-years that were devoted > during the 1970s and 1980s to "optimizing" relational databases to the > point where they could remotely compete in the marketplace. I shudder to think about the fact that theoretical professors routinely ignore the fact that, without the marketplace there would be no databases, no languages, no programmers - and no need of any, either. If systems are not designed for the marketplace, then there is no need of *them*, either! > It is also a tribute to the power of the universities, that by teaching > only relational databases, they could convince an entire generation of > computer scientists that relational databases [consist of things] such as > flat files and Bill[s] of Materials. It *is* a tribute to the universities (back then) that they paid attention to the fact that computer "scientists" (i.e., computer systems specialists) were a market commodity and needed to be trained in accordance with the needs of business and reality. Unfortunately, since then universities have adopted the standpoint that reality doesn't exist, that profit is evil, and that marketplaces are a theoretical concept that shouldn't stand in the way of egalitarianism. This makes survival much more difficult than it needs to be. > Computing history will consider the past 20 years as a kind of Dark Ages of > commercial data processing in which the religious zealots of the Church of > Relationalism managed to hold back progress until a Renaissance > rediscovered the Greece and Rome of pointer-based databases. Database > research has produced a number of good results, but the relational database > is not one of them. Unfortunately, it will also consider the last 10 years as the beginning of the *real* Dark Ages, wherein reality became dispensed with ala Kant, in which the honorable profession of being a businessman became treated as the most abject form of evil to which an individual could aspire, and in which the theoretical data processing professors dumped the entire notion of being responsive to industry - which, in the long run, has footed the bill for its own destruction. Bill Williams ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- My position is strictly my own and cannot even be remotely construed to be that of any other individual or group of individuals, especially the Department of Defense or the US Air Force! -----------------------------------------------------------------------------