"David Cressey" <cressey73@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote in message
news:QL48k.1$0f.0@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
> "Arved Sandstrom" <asandstrom@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote in message
> news:43_7k.979$yg7.121@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
SNIP ]
>> I agree. But it's also possible to be conscientious about educating
>> oneself - doing lots of Googling, reading articles and books, working
>> quality tutorials, posing questions on newsgroups - and nevertheless
miss
>> things. Introductory material will not address intermediate and
advanced
>> issues in detail, for example. Learning OTJ from peers and superiors is
> also
>> hit and miss. And not infrequently you simply will not think to
research
>> something because you do not know that you do not know.
>>
>> Take the subject of this thread, for example. *Once* you are somewhat
> aware
>> that there is such a database design issue, it doesn't take much
Googling
> to
>> turn up some good articles about it. But absent that initial awareness
> it's
>> not that obvious.
>>
>> AHS
>>
>
> The replies you gave to Gene show me how you and I can come to such
> different views on the same subject. I learned database design in about
> the
> 1984 to 1986 time frame, after programming for fifteen years. There
was
> no
> Google. There were no forums, (unless you count VAXnotes conferences
on
> the Digital e-net). There were, however, a few good books on the
> subject,
> some good lecture series, a few very good mentors, people who taught
> database material for a living, and most im****tantly, some examples of
> well
> designed databases.
>
> So in my context it was very easy to become aware that there was
something
> fundamental that I did not know, and that I needed to learn. I had
> designed
> indexed files before to sup****t my apps, so I wasn't starting from
ground
> zero. And I had unconsciously applied some of the normalization rules
in
> my
> design of indexed files. That made it easier for me to learn the formal
> normalization rules and the consequences of departing from them.
>
> Your context sounds quite different. I don't want to put words in your
> mouth. I will say that there are a lot of people out there today who
> switch
> over from storing data in files to storing the same data in a database
> with
> the idea that the switch is a relatively trivial matter with a few
> technical
> details but no fundamentals to rethink. And the benefits they derive
from
> using a database and a DBMS turn out to be relatively trivial, while
the
> costs turn out to be huge.
>
> Some of those people learn the hard way. Some never learn. They move
> back
> to using files because, according to them, databases aren't worth the
> cost
> and aggravation.
Nicely phrased, and you're quite correct, my context is not the same as
yours. My initial background is not databases at all - it's data
files...potentially reams and reams of them. Think scientific programming
back in the late '70's, '80's and early '90's and you'll have a good idea
of
my initial computing environment. The typical data file would be
individually well-described and well-structured, both text and binary, but
there really wasn't a strong argument for using databases. netCDF is a
good
example of the kind of system that a scientific data shop would use. There
is a lot of discipline, no less so than in a good RDBMS-oriented place,
but
one does not think quite the same way.
I suspect the first database that I had anything serious to do with was
likely FoxPro 2.x, which was in use at one organisation for writing an app
to allow people to easily define queries to retrieve end-user data sets
(i.e. final-format data in tables that had already been through very
rigorous conditioning and computation....this latter process being more my
end of things).
At the time that I first started getting introduced to RDBMSs, which
wouldn't be much over a decade ago, Google didn't exist yet either. I
don't
recall really using any other Internet search engines back then. I believe
I
read a bunch of books (probably including some not so good ones), and I
lucked out in having some fairly database-savvy bosses at my first few
"commercial" jobs. But there's no question that my initial self-education,
however well-intentioned, was imperfect, and I made quite a few mistakes.
I
suspect what kept me interested was this: having a mathematical bent made
relations intuitive (and so ideas of normalization inevitably followed),
and
I also intuitively liked the declarative paradigm...i.e. SQL core. So I
thought it was worth pursuing.
Certainly my comments are phrased against the above background.
I might add, with respect to some of your final comments, that I'm not so
sure I'd want people who give up on using RDBMSs to switch back to files.
Because proper use of files is not a trivial matter. To put in a recent
timeframe, would _you_ want a person who can't get SQL and normalized
tables
and indices to switch over to XML and XSLT? :-)
AHS
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