Re: [xml-dev] (data) medium is the message

[Mitch Amiano <mamiano@nc.rr.com>]

As always, interesting material.

In working several years in business operations applications development with various SQL databases, it struck me that the relational model (a) wasn't actually followed by any implementations I saw and (b) to follow it would appear to require that one exhaustively delineate all the functional dependancies which thread throughout all the modules that make up the extended system, and normalize them.

Over the years, OO advocates chimed in with ad-hoc inheritance techniques which collectively they refered to as object models. Popular jargon somewhat obscured the orthogonal contributions of generic programming, templates, and architectural patterns,
which more or less have been subsumed into OO culture.

Even if you can map the constructs of an OO framework onto a particular relational database, it can't be automated because the *intent* is divergent. Well, the intent is mostly informal, unspecified, and floating free. The definitions of the system aren't themselves closed, at least not on the OO side. Media was/is a problem, but it is a mostly mechanical mapping difficulty from one space onto another. The intent of the act of communication with regard to an audience, is the factor which drives these populations apart. Very often that intent is based on nothing more than "it's the hot technology" or "when we have a problem we create a database to fix it."

I suppose somewhere, some graduate student is working on a grand system of Godel numbers, attempting to relate some for-the-purposes-of-the-thesis-dumbed-down OO model to for-the-purposes-of-the-thesis-dumbed-over XML model and for-the-purposes-of-the-thesis-dumbed-up relational model, into a unified formal system. I won't hold my breath. Better to follow what bugs, birds, bees, and trees do: build robust
systems without separate models. 


Simon St.Laurent wrote:
> After a week spent wondering why some RDF people seem intent on
> colonizing XML while some relational database people seem intent on
> blasting it as a false god, I've posted a piece that takes a brief look
> at different options for representing, storing, and processing
> information - and come to the odd conclusion that they're all useful, if
> very different and not necessarily combinable.
> 
> http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/3139
> 
> What we do here is a lot more than "just data".
>