Martijn Tonies wrote:

>
>
>> If they're interested, they're free to come look. Ann and I both
>>represented DEC on various standards committees. If you get involved
>>with one, you will discover that "useful" and "good" are not among their
>>core values. I rest my case on SQL triggers. Ugh.
>>
>>
>
>*g*
>
>
>

It's been awhile since I told this story. Maybe everyone hasn't heard it.

I invented the blob on a Saturday morning in Colorado Springs. I wanted
to be home in Boston, but Boston was having a blizzard or something, so
I was stuck in Colo Spgs. Bummer. My boss had been pushing me to
invent the blob. He had fallen in love with name and wanted something
he could call a blob. So I sat down in my hotel room and invented the blob.

When I got back to New England I announced the invention of the blob to
the larger DEC database community. Almost no reaction. Certainly, no
interest. Later, in an unsuccessful effort to settle the database war,
DEC hired a former bouncer from the Buckets O' Blood bar outside the US
Steel gates in Youngstown, Ohio, to bring peace to the groups to warring
factions, and if not peace, at least compatibility. OK, he had been a
bouncer, looked like a bouncer, but also had a PhD from a German University.

High of the list of contentious issues was the blob. I argued that they
were necessary to store text and images in a database. They said nobody
ever asked for the blob, they had never lost a sale because they didn't
have blobs, the CODASYL database standard didn't say anything about
blobs, a document could be stored through normalization, storing each
line as a separate record, and nobody in the database world did graphics
anyway.

There's a moral here. Arguing about the third dimension with a bunch of
flatlanders is a waste of time and breath. Companies don't waste their
best and brightest on standards committees. Think Melton and you will
understand.

--

Jim Starkey
Netfrastructure, Inc.
978 526-1376



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