From: ara.t.howard@... Date: 2007-03-22T06:23:25+09:00 Subject: Re: Object/Relational Mapping is the Vietnam of Computer Sci On Thu, 22 Mar 2007, James Moore wrote: > On 3/20/07, Austin Ziegler wrote: >> >> Data is king. Applications are pawns. >> > > Data is a dead fish. Applications are knowing how to fish. There are minor > edge cases where data is more important ("feed me now or I die of > starvation"), but in the grand scheme of things data is insignificant > compared to the applications that produce and transform it. > > We use relational databases as object stores because they're cheap and > easily available, not because they're good for the task. here at the national geophysical data ceter http://ngdc.noaa.gov/ we say that data is useless, only the combination of applications and human reasoning can turn it into __information__. so, with that in mind, i'd say that data and applications are useless and that it's only by combining the two using logic (aka business rules) that anything meaningful arises. cast in point : we've 260tb of 'data' sitting in our mass storage device. less than 0.01% ever comes back out. that small percentage is massaged into meaningful __information__ via complex application and human logic though and it's those kernels we're interested in. 2 cts. -a -- be kind whenever possible... it is always possible. - the dalai lama