Dr. Codd Was Right: Elvis has left the building, and Fabian was never here

Leading an Insurrection is now an Official Act

The world is not linear.
-- Dr. McElhone/1974

Well, I'm going to do it, whether the women like it or not. I'm going to protect them.
-- The Orange Shitgibbon^©anon./2024 [y'all get burkhas]

Scientists aren't vocal enough about science. There are large groups of people who think scientists are all frauds and who don't believe in science, and they're being cultured by some of our far right-wing politicians, religious leaders and community leaders.
-- Drew Weissman/2022

To date, Microsoft is stating that organizations testing In-Memory OLTP have seen transaction speeds improve by up to 30 times compared to past performance, with the best performance gains achieved when the business logic resides in the database and not in the applications.
-- Jonathan Watts/2015 [my emphasis]

I have had to explain and re-explain and re-explain and re-explain, you know, how relational databases work, what is an eigenvector, what is dimensionality reduction.

-- Christopher Wylie/2018

... but Flash-based storage has such a different performance profile from rotating media, that I suspect that it will end up having a large impact on filesystem design. Right now, most filesystems tend to be designed with the latencies of rotating media in mind.

-- Linus Torvalds/2007

I believe quite strongly that, if you think about the issue at the appropriate level of abstraction, you're inexorably led to the position that databases must be relational.

-- Chris Date/2009

Election day's thought

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.
-- H. L. Menken/1915 [~~let's prove him wrong~~ guess not]

See you next week in a brand new show^{©Heckle and Jeckle}

Therefore:

In a time of SSD, multi-core/processor, two terabyte memory and Optane App Direct Mode machines, there is no reason not to build from BCNF data. Time to do what Dr. Codd demonstrated. Technology has finally caught up with the maths.

26 March 2009

Elvis has left the building, and Fabian was never here

It occurs to me that, since I am forcefully in the Date/Darwen/McGoveran/Pascal camp, there could be a suspicion that this site is a resurrection of "Database Debunkings" and/or I am an amanuensis or pseudonym for some or all of the above.

Nope. I am a real flesh and blood bloke with the name I was slapped with (me bum still hurts) over the fount. I have arrived at my conclusions quite independently, and disagree at times with some or all of the above. I don't, for example, believe that we should drop ACID. And I do find some of CELKO's writings to be quite lucid. I have been doing databases since before there were any widely available relational engines, about the time Dr. Codd released his first paper. Such databases were not relational; they were used to support statistical and operations research and might now be considered just flat-file systems with a bit indexing. A decade later, dBaseII and Clipper purveyed such and called themselves database systems. Oh, yeah MySql did that, too.

What got this writing exercise started was having the time to delve more fully into the implications of some new-ish hardware; that if enough folk who could see past the nonsense of the God xml and see how we can build truly relational transactional systems with this new hardware; and the realization that both the writing exercise and the system building could all be done for next to no $$$. Such a deal. Which the cynics among us will point out is exactly what blogging on the esoterica of databases is worth; even so, the value of the new systems is likely rather higher.

I also find amusement in the machinations of both suppliers of database software, hardware, and their bureaucratic clients. Expect some musings on such subjects; as the IBM/MySql speculations already posted. Forewarned is forearmed.