M'mmm, Kool Aid

I'll include some of the text, since the way Zsolt's site is structured, entries tend to disappear down a rabbit hole. Today, this is still front page. Go there to finish it up: he's got quite a lot to chew on, and he does the site for a living.


Editor:- July 11, 2011 - I recently had a conversation with a very knowledgeable strategist at a leading enterprise storage software company. I won't say who the company is - but if I did - most of you would know the name.

The interesting thing for me was that he'd recognized that if the hardware architecture of the datacenter is going to change due to the widespread adoption of solid state storage - that will create new markets for traditional software companies too.

And I'm not talking here about new software which simply helps SSDs to work or interoperate with hard drives - but software which does useful things with your data - and which can take advantage of different assumptions about how quickly it can get to that data - and how much intensive manipulation it can do with it.


While he doesn't say BCNF-RDBMS in his text, he's saying it. I've been bugging him for some time to drink the Kool-Aid. Sounds quite like both he and the unnamed "strategist" (no, not I, alas) have quaffed deeply. Face it, if all you do is keep appending flatfile "fields and records" to some file, not only do you never get ahead of the bull, but you get gored sooner or later. BCNF is the *only* hope. Yes, this requires designers/developers to actually *think* about the data. But, isn't that why we get paid the *big bucks*?

(OK, I went a bit asterisk nuts with this one. Finding validation does do that.)