RE: SQL Syntax

> From: jt
>
> I took (semi-)seriously, what You said about "Me, I'd much rather have a
> decent database and somebody who still remembers how to program."
>  I believe
> this concept has gone outta fashion, Joe...  Gone the way of the dinosaur,
> or so's I hear tell.

This actually is the case, I think, JT.  It may be because back in the stone
age, you had to really love programming to want a job in computers.  It was
tedious, difficult work, and often as not the computers fell over dead.  You
had to write your own drivers if you wanted something as exotic as, say, a
hard drive.  And since everything was so godawful expensive, it was
understood that you took your time, designed and coded using a methodology,
and delivered according to a reasonable timetable.

Nowadays, the demand is for more, faster, repeat.  And while that trend
isn't likely to be going away anytime soon, the parallel trend of abdication
of programming effort to tools needs to be halted, and soon.  Why?  Because
in the first generation of tools, the folks that wrote them at least
understood the underlying mechanics of programming, and paid attention to
little details like performance and quality.  Nowadays, in the mad rush to
delivered product (notice I didn't say finished), the idea is simply to use
whatever tools aer available to make pretty pictures on the screen,
regardless of the overall performance, integrity or security of the system.

It's this trend that many ODBC designers seem to have fallen into.  While
SQL in and of itself is simply a tool, it's a tool that can very easily be
misused.  And put into the hands of the end user, with direct access to raw
data, it can indeed be a dangerous thing.

As I said, though, I don't have a solution at this point.  Since the need
for speed has stretched IT budgets to the point where performance is an
afterthought (and even quality is sometimes a side issue), I don't know what
can fix it.  Perhaps a new concept, the information tier, is really a good
idea.  There's nothing stopping us from encapsulating our databases in
servers, and having those servers intercept the ODBC/CLI calls users make.
In fact, it wouldn't be a bad idea to do that as a matter of course, to
provide an entry point for things like security checks and multi-platform
integration.

But if we truly sell ourselves, our users and our industry on the idea that
"data should be accessible by everyone", then I think we may be in for a
long, hard period for IT as databases dis-integrate, failovers fall over and
applications stop providing any meaningful information.

Joe