Mr. Wonka's Factory

Here's a post on simple-talk which was dormant for most of a month (it's down to the last place on the front page today), then got really popular the last few days.

The subject: cleavages; well no, but I've liked that line since Lou Gottlieb used it to introduce a song lo those many years ago. Well, may be, actually, in a manner of speaking.

The subject is database refactoring. The post and discussion started out blandly, but then opened up (cleaved, see?) that long festering wound of front-end vs. back-end design/development. Simple-talk subjects and discussions tend toward a coder perspective, I suppose because T/SQL is often germane to topics, so a certain amount of self-selection exists both for authors and readers.

The idea of refactoring a database, especially given the tripe espoused by the likes of Ambler (some of his stuff), has been hijacked by the kiddie koders. Refactoring, for a RDBMS means getting more normal. It doesn't mean twisting the schema to fit some single access path, a la IMS or xml (hierarchies). That's not why Dr. Codd made the effort. He made the effort because he saw the mess that IMS was making; he'd been there when IMS was released and devised the RM a couple years later. In other words, it didn't take a math guy very long to identify both the problem and the solution.

Now that we have high-core machines with SSD as primary datastore, we can implement BCNF (at least) schemas/catalogs with no worries about "let's denormalize for speed". Those days are truly history.