RE: Picking the Tools -- Marrying processing models to data model s

[Jeff Lowery <jlowery@scenicsoft.com>]

> Uche:
> 
> I can buy that even data reuse might be a mirage: I don't 
> know enough to
> refute the claim, and I wonder whether anyone does.  It seems 
> that all the
> effort has been focused on code reuse just to find that it's 
> an illusion,
> and perhaps if we'd aimed all that effort at data modeling 
> all the while,
> it might have borne more fruit.

Amen, brother.

Actually, it bears fruit daily. Any suite of application built around a
common database is reusing the same data model. The ugly problem is that
it's a relational model most of the time, and winds up having to be mapped
into a set of hierarchical objects *by hand*. I'm not going to hazard a
guess as to whether the process could be automated if the data in the object
hierarchy, with many of the attendant constraints, was represented as a
schema. It couldn't be any harder, however.