From: Austin Ziegler <halostatue@...>
Date: 2007-03-22T06:36:18+09:00
Subject: Re: Object/Relational Mapping is the Vietnam of Computer Sci

On 3/21/07, ara.t.howard@noaa.gov <ara.t.howard@noaa.gov> wrote:
> On Thu, 22 Mar 2007, James Moore wrote:
> > On 3/20/07, Austin Ziegler <halostatue@gmail.com> 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.

I have to disagree with you, Ara. If you start with a set of data and
your business rules, you can reformulate the applications to derive
*value* from the set of data. On the other hand, if you have a set of
applications that implement your business rules and no data ... you
can't derive value at all.

Without data, you absolutely cannot do anything. If customers have to,
they can buy or write new programs to work with their data. They can
almost *never* recover lost data.

Case in point: Alaska Revenue just had to spend $200,000 in overtime
to rescan paper data that had been lost from their online system and
the backup was unreadable.

> 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.

Right, but if you needed to, you could easily (fsvo easily) rewrite
the complex application; it would be far harder to try to recreate the
data -- especially the historical data you have from satellite
imagery. It's not as if you can rewind the clock seven days to get a
satellite image you lost a week ago.

You are right that programs help you derive *value* from the data, but
programs are far more easily replaced than data.

-austin
-- 
Austin Ziegler * halostatue@gmail.com * http://www.halostatue.ca/
               * austin@halostatue.ca * http://www.halostatue.ca/feed/
               * austin@zieglers.ca