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On 4/21/05, Ken North <kennorth@sbcglobal.net> wrote:
> Bob Foster wrote:
> > All of these surveys violate the random sample assumption (in spades).
>
> Principles of Survey Research
> Part 5: Populations and Samples
> ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes Volume 27 No 5, page 19
> http://www.idi.ntnu.no/grupper/su/publ/ese/kitchenham-survey5.pdf
...
> Non-Probabilistic Sampling Methods
> [snip]
> Convenience sampling involves obtaining responses from those
> people who are available and willing to take part. The main
> problem with this approach is that the people who are willing to
> participate may differ in important ways from those who are not
> willing.
I think it's very clear that the survey in question is a
non-probabilistic sample, hence the results are interesting, but
hardly conclusive. Just as the only poll that really matters is on
election day, the only opinion that really counts is one backed up by
an investment of time or money in actually using and deploying a
software technology. Time will tell about that!
What about the substance of Jonathan's pushback on my somewhat gloomy
assessment of the prospects for XQuery as a client programming
environment as opposed to a DBMS query language? SOMEBODY on this
list must disagree with me besides DataDirect employees :-) Ron
Bourret asked DD to clarify their "XQuery in the Middle Tier" story on
the xquery-talk mailing list
http://xquery.com/pipermail/talk/2005-April/000551.html, maybe someone
could follow up here as well, because I think this is a bigger and
more diverse audience.
I just want to hear people's use cases and come to a better-informed
opinion on whether XSLT 1.0 or 2.0 does the job for them, whether
XQuery does it better, or whether we need something altogether
different (perhaps along the lines of E4X or C-Omega). My current
position is that XQuery is the undisputed choice for querying XML
content in a database, but there are so many other options for finding
and manipulating XML on the client and middle tiers that it is
difficult to make a compelling case for XQuery there. Somebody who
doesn't have an axe to grind please tell us why I'm wrong!
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