Re: Advice needed on a multimember DDS file to be converted

Aaron Bartell wrote:

I won't deny that a majority of RPG coders are under-educated when it comes
to building a solid relational DB, but with a little training we are able to
accomplish with one person what other shops require 2 or more to do. Note I
put myself in that RDBMS under-educated category just in case anybody
thought I was pontificating :-)

Oh pshaw, Aaron - you pontificate? <grin>

But I'm in the same boat as you, buddy - being pretty much self-educated in nearly everything having to do with computers, I know that there are people in our own community like Birgitta Hauser who have probably forgotten more about proper database design than I know. I'm no slouch - I know normalization (and over-normalization - in fact, I like to think I coined the term "strategic denormalization" at SSA in a previous life <grin>). But as we begin to take more and more advantage of the true RDBMS capabilities of the database, we would do well to heed the accumulated wisdom of folks who have been doing it on other databases for years, simply because that was the *only* thing they could do.

That being said, I continue to find weak the argument that because DB2 for the i has capabilities other database lack, that it is somehow less of an RDBMS. There *are* things DB2 lacks (although V6R1 adds a bunch of those in), but none of them are large enough to drive a truck through, and every RDBMS has its own weaknesses. I think DB2 for the i stacks up there pretty well with the rest of the world - *and* it adds unique capabilities that allow us to do things others can't.

Joe