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Foundation for Object / Relational Databases: The Third Manifesto
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Author: C. J. Date, Hugh Darwen
List Price: $44.95
Our Price: Click to see the latest and low price
ISBN: 0201309785
Publisher: Addison-Wesley Pub Co (05 June, 1998)
Edition: Hardcover
Sales Rank: 130,308
Average Customer Rating: 3 out of 5
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Customer ReviewsRating: 3 out of 5
Disappointed academics argue for a new database utopia
It really is a manifesto. The authors tell us how database software has strayed from the one true theory and how everything would be so much better if databases were designed with theoretical elegance as the highest priority. Since this unlikely to happen any time soon, the book isn't of immediate practical use, but if you're interested in software design and aren't turned off by highly opinionated writing, it's a thought-provoking read. They give formal, mathematical definitions of their theory, but also explain the same thing in prose, so database programmers should be able to understand their arguments even if they skip the mathematics as I did.The purpose of a political document is persuasion, and although they make some good points I wasn't convinced. All of their arguments are based on theoretical elegance. What's really needed is an extended example showing how a practical database would be more easily modelled using their theory. I was left wondering whether a "theoretically correct" database would actually be easier to build and maintain than the ad-hoc systems we have today - many a theoretically elegant language turns out to be too difficult to use in practice. Also, the authors dismiss some opposing arguments without really understanding their benefits. For example, Appendix B describes how to make a relational view based on a table of object values, which seems like a nice way of having your cake and eating it too (since you can have encapsulation and inheritance). But after bringing it up they dismiss with "what purpose would be served?" I was left wishing it were an online discussion so I could argue back.
Rating: 2 out of 5
Help me on this one
The Third Manifesto spends most of its time ranting about the authors' disapointments with industry-leading products like Oracle 8.0i and Informix. In the first chapter, they present example of a nested table object, a standard OORDBMS feature, then excoriate the capability as not being 'relational'. They take unctuous umbrage at anyone who would dare to violate their view of the relational model. Beyond this, I could not follow the logic of their arguments against these types of constructions, because they do not use the scientific method.I would have liked a more mathematical or scientific description of their arguments. For instance, they expend alot of words on the object movement, but they do not make their topic any clearer with definitions and words. Despite using quasi-mathematical arguments, this is not a work that would stand up to rigorous academic defence. None of the terms are defined. There is no presentation of theorems or lemma, as in Donald's Knuth's books. This is one of those books the reader has to 'get'. As a systems architect and database designer, I am getting a bit tired hearing about null field discussions and the lack of proper relations in SQL. I guess this group would say that the systems we design are not valid. If you need to hear the arguments of DB2 and relational bigots, then this book may be usefull to you. Otherwize, there are many other text books to read to improve and develop your design skills.
Rating: 3 out of 5
occasional gems in an incomplete work of standard pomposity
While Date's elementary database text is an ageless classic and his first series of collected RDBMS writings is rich in original material, the current volume is a profound disappointment. Date and his cohort, Darwen (who tries too hard), derive material from a litany of sources, yet the litany is rather more remarkable for some of its patent omissions than for its completeness. Once again, Date has steered clear of security considerations, and--where he dares to address them--he continues to confuse the most basic terminology, sounding, as it were, like Fernandez and Wood reanimated on tetrodotoxin and living in some bizarre Winogradesque world of datasets and clusters. I wouldn't complain about this ignorance were it not for the overwhelming and inescapable pomposity that cloys nearly every paragraph. I truly wish Date would stop characterizing everyone who fails to embrace his parochial cosmology as a latter-day Hitler, or stop trying to build a career out of hackeneyed digressions about flawed SQL implementations of trivalent logic, etc., a la some Sandhu beating his head against the wall studying the same polyinstantiated three-tuple m-relation for fifteen years. A possibly tangential point, but one worth noting: the reader gets the impression that Date has not designed--let alone coded--an end-to-end DBMS application with graphical support, data distribution considerations, etc., for more than twenty years. As someone who can both theorize and build systems, I prefer to read authors whose gratuitous deprecation of others' work is backed by palpable (read as "operational") achievements.
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