The dbdebunk revival

[Bob Badour]

Fabian asked me to post this anywhere people might be interested:


We would like to alert you to our intention to revamp and revive the
site. We are working on a new layout with better design and
accessibility, and cleaning and revising the old material, in
preparation for new material.

Its focus will remain data fundamentals, and it will still be
critical of fallacies and misconceptions, but with a more corrective,
educational bent, less personal and strident and societal issues not
directly related to the technical specifics.

We will rely on readers to submit items they deem fallacious to which
we will selectively offer corrective/educational response.

It may take us some time to ready it for the launch, but in the
meantime we thought to give people a heads up, and gauge their
interest.

We look forward to hearing from you and hope to have you as a reader.

Thanks and best regards,

Fabian Pascal
(for the new http://www.dbdebunk.com partnership)

[Gene Wirchenko]

On Wed, 11 Jul 2012 20:27:11 -0700, Bob Badour <b...@badour.net> wrote:

>Fabian asked me to post this anywhere people might be interested:

[snip]

>We look forward to hearing from you and hope to have you as a reader.

Even after all this time, I still checked it regularly. I hope
it comes off well.

Sincerely,

Gene Wirchenko

[Gene Wirchenko]

On Wed, 11 Jul 2012 22:03:58 -0700, Gene Wirchenko <ge...@ocis.net>
wrote:

And I have just posted a copy of your post to the TTM mailing
list.

Sincerely,

Gene Wirchenko

[Keith H Duggar]

On Jul 11, 11:27 pm, Bob Badour <b...@badour.net> wrote:
> Fabian asked me to post this anywhere people might be interested:
>
> We would like to alert you to our intention to revamp and revive the
> site. We are working on a new layout with better design and
> accessibility, and cleaning and revising the old material, in
> preparation for new material.
>
> Its focus will remain data fundamentals, and it will still be
> critical of fallacies and misconceptions, but with a more corrective,
> educational bent, less personal and strident and societal issues not
> directly related to the technical specifics.

This is fantastic news! Thank you Bob!

If at some point you have a beta site please let me know.

KHD

[David Portas]

"Bob Badour" wrote in message
news:htudnVdebotj3mPS...@giganews.com...

> We would like to alert you to our intention to revamp and revive the
> site. We are working on a new layout with better design and
> accessibility, and cleaning and revising the old material, in
> preparation for new material.

This is very good news. I'm looking forward to the new and improved
dbdebunk.

David

[paul c]

On 11/07/2012 8:27 PM, Bob Badour wrote:
> Its focus will remain data fundamentals, and it will still be
> critical of fallacies and misconceptions, but with a more corrective,
> educational bent, less personal and strident and societal issues not
> directly related to the technical specifics.

Looking forward to it.

FP was one of the very few bright lights in the db field. As a matter
of accuracy, what he wrote was rather impersonal, it was the half-assed
ideas he ridiculed. The more puerile motor mouths who resorted to the
personal stuff just didn't have the nous to counter his arguments. If
he made any mistake, it was to give children a platform.

I hope "To Laugh or Cry?" survives in some fashion. Almost every week,
it made me laugh. Since dbdebunk went stagnant, it's been much harder
to get my jollies, I have to search general gossip sites like
theregister for quotes by DB2 execs and the like. There was a good one
last week about throwing the juvenile misconception called RDF against
the wall to see it it sticks.

Relational theory is not only widely misunderstood but its application
remains incomplete so it makes sense to me that FP and the other lights
should continue to finish their work. Codd didn't give up just because
the powerful IMS factions tried to sabotage him. It seems most of FP's
critics had similar vested interests.

Also hoping he makes some money out of it, advertisements wouldn't
bother me.

[Anne & Lynn Wheeler]

paul c <toledob...@oohay.ac> writes:
> Relational theory is not only widely misunderstood but its application
> remains incomplete so it makes sense to me that FP and the other
> lights should continue to finish their work. Codd didn't give up just
> because the powerful IMS factions tried to sabotage him. It seems most
> of FP's critics had similar vested interests.

IMS rivalry was more friendly than that ... I worked with Jim in
system/r days and when he left for tandem ... one of the things he tries
to palm off on me is consulting with IMS group.

It was EAGLE (IMS followon) that was going to be the grand & glorious
... folklore is that with the whole corporation focused on EAGLE
... that it was possible to do the system/r technology transfer from
bldg. 28 to endicott ... to get out SQL/DS.

It wasn't until EAGLE implodes that they asked how fast could there be a
port to MVS ... for eventually release as DB2 (announced for decision
support). mentions system/r, sql/ds & eagle
http://www.mcjones.org/System_R/SQL_Reunion_95/sqlr95-SQL_DS.html

more mention of eagle
http://www.mcjones.org/System_R/SQL_Reunion_95/sqlr95-DB2.html

above mentions baker ... who would say that he did the majority of
sql/ds tech transfer from endicott back to stl (for db2).

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

[paul c]

On 15/07/2012 12:47 PM, Anne & Lynn Wheeler wrote:
> IMS rivalry was more friendly than that

Among the techies no doubt, but the HW salesmen who made huge
commissions as well as the IMS execs were brutal, not only directly but
behind Codd's back. I've heard the stories from a couple of people who
knew him quite well.

[Anne & Lynn Wheeler]

paul c <toledob...@oohay.ac> writes:
> Among the techies no doubt, but the HW salesmen who made huge
> commissions as well as the IMS execs were brutal, not only directly
> but behind Codd's back. I've heard the stories from a couple of
> people who knew him quite well.

there were some other issues that came into play with marketing.

IMS started out on OS/360 batch MVT platform ... which evolves
into the (batch) MVS platform

system/r had been done on the virtual machine vm/370 platform ... and
the MVS organization was involved in all sorts of internal politics
... including repeatedly trying to have the vm/370 product killed off.

I've commented that part of the issue was that in the wake of the
"Future System" failure ... the culture of the corporation significantly
changed ... with lots of people operating their careers with managing
information up the chain. Ferguson & Morris, "Computer Wars:
The Post-IBM World", Time Books, 1993:

... and perhaps most damaging, the old culture under Watson Snr and Jr
of free and vigorous debate was replaced with sycophancy and make no
waves under Opel and Akers. It's claimed that thereafter, IBM lived in
the shadow of defeat

... snip ...

another quote from the book:

But because of the heavy investment of face by the top management, F/S
took years to kill, although its wrongheadedness was obvious from the
very outset. "For the first time, during F/S, outspoken criticism
became politically dangerous," recalls a former top executive.

... snip ...

one of the things they (also) let me do was play disk engineer in the
disk development engineering lab. when I first wandered in, they were
scheduling development disk testing dedicated, "stand-alone", 7x24
around the clock. At one point they had tried installing MVS in order to
do multiple, concurrent testing ... but found MVS had 15min MTBF in that
environment. I offerred to rewrite i/o supervisor to make it bullet
proof and never fail (so they could do on-demand, anytime, concurrent
testing, greatly increasing disk development productivity). I wrote an
internal only paper on what was done and happened to mention MVS with
15min MTBF ... which brought the wrath of the MVS organization down on
my head.