"John S. Gage" wrote:
>
>
> I would like to turn the question around. Is there a place for storing
> table definitions in RDF? Wouldn't that make more sense?
>
Irregardless of technical architecture, it is interesting that sooner or
later folks want to use RDBMS's. I have previously asked the question
that if we are creating XML schema to represent information, why not
avoid all the hassle and store it directly as XML. This is the same
question John asks of RDF.
Yet the folks working in this area (the mailing list quoted from) are
asking the opposite question.
Why is that? Why does it keep re-appearing as an issue. Map from OO to
R, Map from XML to R, map from RDF to R, etc....
Here is my take on it.
1) RDBMS technology is well known.
2) RDBMS technology is highly robust.
3) RDBMS technology is usually installed already.
4) Systems managment for RDBMS technology is usually present.
5) Performance tuning and scaling to massive quantities of data are well
understood.
i.e., it's the path of least resistance. It re-uses not only
programming paradigms your programmers most likely already know, but it
re-uses systems management investments that you already have made.
Re-training programmers, newly training systems folks and gaining the
years of hard won practical experience in production deployment are all
very expensive things to do. One should not under estimate the
difficulty of actually achieving these things.
Now, if you have the advantage of starting your enterprise from scratch,
and it can survive for the years needed to gain operational comfort, you
can launch all new infra-structure technology. But most of us don't
have that situation. We have to get from where we are today (skill sets
and knowledge base) to someplace else completely different and do it
without missing a beat and without any extra resources to help us out!
I think this is the single most missed factor that proponents of new
ways of doing things miss. It's their blind spot, because they don't
have any missing skills or knowledge, it all works for them just
fine.....
--
Wayne D. Wilson
University of Michigan
Medical School Information Systems
