I saw some interesting comments related to my blog entries. Hope you are reading them... the main subject is object to relational mapping (OMR). I'll get back to that soon. For now, I want to continue what I was talking about

Some people are really passionate about following a strict approach. This can cause problems with such things as encapsulation that insures that the implementation of the object is opaque. Look at it a little bit as being very strict about following the highest possible normal form. My point is that you have to be careful about not offending people in their approach. Learn about their methodology before jumping into a passionate presentation of your approach: Take them from where they are to where you want them to be slowly, watching for resistance where communication could break down.

Looking back at the employee definition presented in my previous blog entry, note the following: A manager can have multiple employees working for her. This leads to a representation where a manager object includes a collection of employee objects. This also leads to implementation performance problems where because all the objects were instantiated (created) it took a long time to create the object that included the collection of object. The concept of "lazy binding" was implemented to solve this. Basically, the object in a collection is not instantiated until it is accessed.

This is another area where database specialists can start a discussion to improve the overall performance. Now that I've set the premise, I'll cover it in more details next time.

When I was in school I wanted to know why I had to learn something: Why learn about history? It’s about a bunch of dead people, often from far away. I would also ask: Why would I ever learn English. . .

I feel that the computer industry does not only forget about history but is quick to discard what has been done before. Just remember when object databases came out, the trade magazines where trumpeting the death of relational databases.

There is a disconnect between the object-oriented (OO) approach and the use of relational databases. This will be the subject of the next few entries. Lets start with an example:

An object person will look at the employees of a company and see managers, full-time employees, part-time employees and contractors. This will lead to the following model:

With the definition of the multiple types of employees, we can easily see that they will want multiple tables, one per defined object. Of course, for a database person, we see something like:

CREATE TABLE employee (
Empno int PRIMARY KEY,
mgrNo int ,
employeeType
. . .
);

As you can see, we can already see that a "data access expert" can start some discussions with the OO architects and programmers.

Don’t get me wrong. I like OO. I think it is a wonderful approach but just like anything it can be abused. See what you think of: http://csis.pace.edu/~bergin/patterns/ppoop.html

The first entry went in almost without problems. I had to quickly add some formatting after I posted it to make it more readable. Over time, I'll figure out how to do this and make my formatting fancier.

I'm new to blogging. I'm also pretty new at reading blogs. With the new Web 2.0 technologies, there is no need to go to a blog every so often to find out if there is something new. So, in case you don't know, here's some information on dealing with blogs.

Blogs support a capability called syndication. This allows to create what's called a feed to warn people of changes. There are two main types of feeds: RSS and Atom. No need to know more about it for now. Just that you can use a feed URL to get the changes in a syndicated site.

I would suggest that you use a feed reader. Why? because there are many sites you may want to subscribe to. For example:

- Guy Bowerman's blog (http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/blogs/page/gbowerman)
- Madison Pruet's blog (http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/blogs/page/roundrep)
- Feeds form the IIUG site (http://www.iiug.org/rss/index.php)
- Informix Zone site (http://www.informix-zone.com/)
- and many more. . .

Take a look at the latest IIUG newsletter (insider #94) for more in the Informix Resource section.
see: http://www.iiug.org/Insider/insider_apr08.php

Having to visit each site regularly to see if it has new stuff can be time consuming. Using a feed readeraggregates all those and lets you know what's new. That's the way to go!.

If you do a search on the web, you can find multiple feed readers. I did not want to spend too much time figuring it out so I downloaded a Windows-based open-source product that will do until I find or am told about something better. Check out: http://www.feedreader.com/

If you haven't done it already, set yourself up and stay informed on the latest entries.

That's it for the introduction to this blog. Now it's time to dive into Informix and Computing!

Back in around 1988, I decided it was time for me to learn about object-oriented programming, design, etc. Learning C++ was not too bad but when it came to define problems in an object oriented way, I started to panic: Had I reached the limit of what I was able to learn? Had I been passed by technology? Was I now a dinosaur? (and you thought the title referred to something else...)

It turned out ok... I think

Today, the rate of change in technology has been accelerating and does not seem to be slowing down. To make things worst for database people, we've been told for years that database are commodities and they are just a persistent storage. I may expand on that later but let's just say for now that I totally disagree.

This being said, why start a blog? For one, I want to communicate with the Informix community in a more continuous manner and on subjects that may not require a one-hour powerpoint presentation. I want to discuss any technologies that is remotely related to databases and I want to start a continuous dialog with the Informix community on any subject of interest.

This blog will be in part educational (I hope) and also a place to discuss business problems and potential approaches to solutions. I believe that DBAs are experts in optimizing database access. It is time to expand DBAs impact in the enterprise to improve data processing. There is no need for a DBA to become a programmer. It is an issue of getting involve in the analysis and design of new applications. For programmers using Informix, let's start talking about what you are trying to accomplish. We may be able to find a better approach specially considering the IDS new features and database extensibility.

Please comment on my blog entries and send me your questions and let's start talking!