Comments on: Oracle RDBMS Technology is Old. It Must Be Obsolete! Disk Drives Forever!

By: Noons

Noons — Mon, 04 Jun 2007 01:04:32 +0000

Hmmmmmm……:

“Each line in the table is a record, or sometimes a row or tuple.”

yeah!

right…

(back-off slowly, maintain eye contact…)

By: Monthly Blogroll Report (May 2007) « Coskans Approach to Oracle

Monthly Blogroll Report (May 2007) « Coskans Approach to Oracle — Wed, 30 May 2007 12:03:01 +0000

[...] Closson, who writes good technical articles mostly about RAC, questioned the oldness of Oracle RDBMS technology. There is also a debate about the entry by [...]

By: RAC o non RAC « Oracle and other

RAC o non RAC « Oracle and other — Wed, 23 May 2007 14:46:48 +0000

[...] dal loro effettivo valore. Secondo me, continuando il discorso si sta poco a collegarsi anche al post di qualche giorno fa di Kevin Closson. In cui l’autore critica un articolo in cui si afferma che la tecnologia dei database [...]

By: Jared

Jared — Tue, 22 May 2007 22:41:39 +0000

Kind of jumps the topic, but I just can’t let it go.

Re the comment:
“but then cars aren’t much bigger or faster than they were fifty years ago (and not orders of magnitude higher than they were a hundred years ago).”

Definitely not the words of a car nut. Cars now are not only faster, they are much faster than they were 50 years ago; they are also much more reliable, and get better mileage.

$30,000 US will buy enough car to beat production car made in the 1950’s. There are numerous examples.

By: Gary

Gary — Sat, 19 May 2007 21:23:55 +0000

“Why is there a mindset in IT that all old technology must go? ”
I think sometimes we can be surprised that old technology is still here. Yes, cars still have internal combustion engines, but then cars aren’t much bigger or faster than they were fifty years ago (and not orders of magnitude higher than they were a hundred years ago).
Volumes of data have increased by orders of magnitude though. So it can be surprising that relational databases still work, but it is a testament to the strength of the underlying concepts that it does.

By: DJ

DJ — Sat, 19 May 2007 17:02:40 +0000

I will cut the guy some slack. At least, he pointed out bind variable at the end of the article. That’s in 1999, and a lot of people are still NOT using bind variable 8 years later. He is not completely clueless.

By: kevinclosson

kevinclosson — Sat, 19 May 2007 05:18:05 +0000

Nice, Hemant…thanks for reading. See you on oracle-l…

By: Hemant K Chitale

Hemant K Chitale — Sat, 19 May 2007 05:12:47 +0000

I am 40 years old. That article, even if written in 1999, seems to have been written by someone who was 15 years old at the time. He sure is very dismissive of what some of us have been doing for a one to three decades.
Statements like “andthey’re still a big deal today, which is a little peculiar” and “Sometimes this is a very silly way to store information. When the information naturally has a tabular structure it’s fine. When it doesn’t, you have to squeeze it into a table, and some of the techniques for doing that are more successful than others.” and “There are a bunch of other SQL commands for creating and discarding tables, for granting and revoking access permissions, for committing and abandoning transactions, and so forth. But these four are the important ones. Congratulations; you are now a SQL programmer.” make me see “ohmigod ! what have I been doing all these decades thinking that I was working with some very complex technology!”. The writer makes an RDBMS seem as easy as, say, putting on your shoes, which you learn to do so early in Primary (Elementary) School.
Hemant K Chitale

By: kevinclosson

kevinclosson — Fri, 18 May 2007 20:44:13 +0000

Jared,

My bad…the articel was writtin in 1999….I had a typo…fixed now…

By: Mark J. Bobak

Mark J. Bobak — Fri, 18 May 2007 20:38:11 +0000

Hey Kevin,

Speaking of the next big thing after “little, brown, spinning disks”, check this out:
http://hardware.slashdot.org/hardware/07/05/18/0546244.shtml

By: Jared

Jared — Fri, 18 May 2007 19:47:36 +0000

It’s kind of funny in retrospect.

That article is 17 years old now. Oracle was still a fairly young company at that time. I was not yet a user of Oracle, that wouldn’t happen until 1994.

So now the shoe is on the other foot. Perl is now a legacy language.
When I started using Perl ~1993, it was version 4. It is now version 5.8.x, though don’t let the version numbers fool you. There have been many revisions in that time.

And yet, there are still shops that won’t allow Perl.
1980’s technology, and there are still shops that won’t adopt it.

Go figure.