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.

1 comment:

tikitodo said...

I have recently heard about other mdf recovery tools, it is pretty efficient