Dr. Codd Was Right: Quant's Hubris

Unitary Executive ≡ Dictator

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

Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely.
-- Lord Acton/1887

Effective immediately, all laws, regulations, and obsolete norms limiting my authority over federal govenment employment are suspended. I am the unitary executive, and if you work for the federal government, you work for me. I demand total loyalty from my employees.
-- Donald J. Trump by Executive Order, this day 7 December 2025

Here, too, powerful people are responding to authoritarian advances just as their Hungarian counterparts have — not with defiance, but with capitulation, convinced that they can maintain their independence and stay above the fray.
-- David Pressman/2025 [former Amb. there - a cautionary tale]

There's not a single example of things working out for the appeaser.
-- Nicolle Wallace/2024 [like this? the next extortion is on the way]

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

This Week's thought

Official statistics are a public good. Over the long run, there's no replacement for the government. No private-sector company has the incentive to produce trustworthy official statistics that are available to everybody at no cost.
-- Erica Groshen/2025 [ex-BLS Commissioner]

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 (RIP) 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.

10 July 2018

Quant's Hubris - part the third

Once again, we find quants being utterly, and arrogantly, innumerate. Here is a piece telling quants how to build a "database". It's not, of course. Just a flat file your Grand Pappy would be happy with. Gad. We're into serious civil regression.

Commandment 1: all your data shall fit into one single dataframe

And it goes on to be worse. Sigh.

Dr. Codd Was Right

Unitary Executive ≡ Dictator

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10 July 2018

Quant's Hubris - part the third

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