Lots of great conversation here. Thanks to all for participating. David, you wrote: >Be aware that Pascal, along with Date and Darwen, are...how do I put >this gently...cranks. They've been getting more strident and >irrational as the decades go by. I can't speak to that statement directly. Indirectly, however, the sources Pascal cites in the body of the text (if I had to guess, and I do because I'm too lazy to count them all) seem to be ~90% works by C.J. Date. So it seems chiefly to be a distillation of Date's ideas, e.g. potentially a cloistered treatise. Is Pascal an academic who doesn't have real world knowledge gained from having logically and physically designed, then brought to production, monitored, refined, and tuned databases, and has answered to end users, for a wide variety of customers and projects? His book's subtitle is: "A Reference for the Thinking Practitioner." If he is not himself a practitioner out there in the trenches, doing the best with whatever technology presently exists, then I'm slightly less interested in what he has to say, although I appreciate what he's trying to do. But I don't want to dwell on the OUGHT in terms of future technology; I want to dwell on the IS. Pleas that we ought to demand better technology are all to the good - Is there a good book out there about DB design written *by* real-world practitioners, *for* real-world practitioners that addresses Pascal and Date's concerns, yet focuses on the technology we have to live with today? Something vendor-neutral if possible. Dana
