Viewing profile — ErwinSmout

Not necessarily. If you ponder the importance of proper (robust, reliable, dependable) data management for data that keeps nuclear plants going, for farmaceutical research data, fo…

And Tony Hoare probably wished he hadn't made his "billion dollar mistake". But at any rate, you could also try and ponder how unbelievably exceptionally awful it must have been th…

SQL (the language that is, as defined by ISO) has COLLECT and UNNEST operators which come reasonably close (not 100% of course) to "Date's concept of relation-valued attributes". M…

"The one that his a lot of people is WHERE NOT IN ( ) where contains a NULL. Because NOT IN unrolls to “ AND AND … AND ” any NULL values in the set makes one predicate NULL which m…

Yes. The reason is lazy people expect to be able to ask five questions in one go and expect one single answer to answer all five of them. The key is to realize that submitting a qu…

The predicate corresponding to an outer join is fundamentally disjunctive in nature (any outer join is equivalent to a UNION of at least 2 SELECTs) meaning that "after the fact", t…

"Many of those complaints seem theoretical. I like to focus on practical concerns." The only reason ever why people engage into theory, is precisely because of a deeply rooted desi…

:-) And those that are built on "first principles" end up looking like a dog's breakfast just as well because people expect to not have to learn a novel language. People don't want…

"There were also definitely some bad paradigms invented as a result of SQL (e.g. all business logic lives in the database as stored procedures or stored functions)," I hope you don…

In the relational model, no there is no such thing as "optional values". Even Codd often hinted (quite a bit of material in the 1990 book gives such hints) that "if a row has a nul…

"NULL only has one meaning: NULL. This is roughly analogous to unknown." From the re-published version of "Much ado about nothing, part 2" (re-published in "Database Dreaming, Vol …

In "Stating the obvious", C.J. Date wrote 50 (FIFTY) pages solely on the subject of how SQL screwed up with the most fundamental operator of all : testing for equality. I'll repeat…

In fact, Date has recently revised a whole slew of "old" papers of his, got them up-to-date wrt his current thinking, and (re-) published them. His "A critique of SQL/86" paper(s) …

What they "called out as flawed" was the impossibility to declare any such rule with SQL as it stood. What they were "criticizing" was precisely the fact that a data language that …

Because "speaking SQL" [even before SQL as such was even invented, hence the scare quotes] was intended as a skill to be practiced only by those who also grasped the [mathematical]…

With one single exception : you cannot use a CHECK clause to check that a table must be nonempty, because the semantics of the CHECK clause are that it must be satisfied by all row…

I invite you to inspect, even if only cursorily, my above exchange with mr. antonvs. My point is that Micro$oft was created by programmers (in fact in its earliest days it was most…

No, Date did not "miss the point". He properly identified that all of Meijer's arguments he used to make his point were in fact complete bunk. And he clearly and factually answered…

Dude, please, give me a break. Erik Meijer is that, eurhm, person, I remember from publicly stating that his favourite resarch method is "throwing things at the wall and see what s…

The basic text of the book was written before Lex died (must have been +- 2006), my work in which I cracked that problem saw the light of day after that time. So "we do not yet kno…

It was probably also influenced by Codd's own preference for the data language in calculus-based style (Codd's roots as a mathematician are to "blame" here), as opposed to algebra-…

"And yet an API is kinda desirable." Yeah. however I may not live to see the day when that desire, which I agree is felt by 99.99% of the developer community (hell, even by 99.99% …

In the perception of the Micro$oft users who are brainwashed with the idea that what Micro$oft does is good for the developers. (In fact, it might even be outright true. But that's…

Link between me and SIRA_PRISE : I am the author. codeshitter ad-homs : yeah well I know they are. The fact of the matter is the history between SIRA_PRISE and me (and why I did it…

See the "business case for SIRA_PRISE". Imagine how many years of codeshitter-hours you [or, if you're in the DBMS market, your customers] would no longer have to pay for if you co…