DBA According to Moses

Every now and again I'll run across a posting which is prescriptive in nature. Some more aggressive in tone than others. Today brings a latter day Moses, via the PG site.

I didn't add anything, or more commandments. What piques my interest, enough to spend a few minutes typing, is the nature of his commandments. Fact is, that's always the interesting bit to such posts: what is the battlefield?

For a database oriented site, it was, at one time, about a 50/50 chance that the battlefield was over how to build database-centric applications in the face COBOL/PHP/java + RBAR data opposition. Alas, these days it seems that even the simple-talk, and certainly the PG folks (it is a code + RBAR oriented datastore from the beginning), have been assimilated by the Borg. It's really too bad. Current technology, modulo the Big Data knuckleheads, is exactly what Dr. Codd had in mind when laying out the RM: all is related, all actions happen "at once", and implmentation is left to the vendor. The key notion to the RM, more than any other aspect, is analogous to the difference between sigma notation and matrix notation. RBAR on the one hand, and it-happens-all-at-once on the other. Of course, real hardware is inherently sequential on the metal. Well, in truth, not so much any longer.

Anyway, this Moses posting is about the care and feeding aspects, what was once the only definition, of DBA. Save for a jibe to promote better coding!! Too bad. Dr. Codd's ghost should be haunting more who claim to "do" RDBMS. May be then we'll all find the gonads to fight for what is right? We need a Bravedata, complete with lots o blue paint (that's IBM avatar, of course).