On 3/28/07, Eleanor McHugh <eleanor / games-with-brains.com> wrote: > On 28 Mar 2007, at 09:41, Edwin Fine wrote: > > Bottom line is, I agree with ESR: > > "Much of what looks like rudeness in hacker circles is not intended to > > give offense. Rather, it's the product of the direct, > > cut-through-the-bullshit communications style that is natural to > > people > > who are more concerned about solving problems than making others feel > > warm and fuzzy." > It is possible to be both polite and terse, but the effort required > is often much higher than that required to do some basic fact- > checking with Google. Each time someone fires off an ill-considered > opinion based on fashion, marketing hype or religious predilection > they're effectively polluting our shared intellectual space, and yet > somehow it's those who suffer this on a daily basis who're the > offensive ones... As the one who has been accused of being excessively abusive in this thread, I need to point out that I didn't call the author of the original post an idiot; I said that they were *either* ignorant or an idiot. One *cannot* rationally say that "I think relational databases are evil" if you know anything about the theory *unless* you're being willfully ignorant and/or stupid. As is said above, you're choosing fashion, hype, or religion over science and knowledge. There are a lot of things that one can say about SQL databases that are minimally based on relational theory, most of them pretty darned awful, but the merest bit of knowledge about data theory precludes you from suggesting that any of a number of other "database" types are even viable from that standpoint. They may *work*, but they don't do so through any rigorous theory or application of computer science; there's a lot of code out there that does exactly that, and I've written some of it. (Not for these types of systems, obviously.) But ultimately, one hits a point where the lack of theory involved in your data store *will* come to bite you. A lot of people start looking at other options than SQL databases precisely because the reality of SQL doesn't match relational algebra and the relational model. They assume that because database management system vendors, who are part of the hype machine and are just as vulnerable to the hype, didn't implement things properly, that the whole theory is bunk. Well, it isn't. And most SQL databases are still better structured than object databases will ever be. -austin -- Austin Ziegler * halostatue / gmail.com * http://www.halostatue.ca/ * austin / halostatue.ca * http://www.halostatue.ca/feed/ * austin / zieglers.ca