On Fri, Jun 09, 2006 at 09:54:56AM -0700, dananrg@xxxxxxxxx wrote: > 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. Good eye :) > 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? Yes. > 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. Any random book by Joe Celko is pretty good on this, especially the recent ones. Celko was on the committee that did the SQL92 standard--the last one in EBNF, alas--and has been out in the trenches for decades. He knows about mathematics and frequently cites math papers :) Cheers, D -- David Fetter <david@xxxxxxxxxx> http://fetter.org/ phone: +1 415 235 3778 AIM: dfetter666 Skype: davidfetter Remember to vote!
