> It certainly is, and those that are too lazy to study history are
> bound to repeat its mistakes.
>
> It would be good to study the Oracle experience and the Ingres
> experience. Have a look at, for instance:
> http://www.cc.utu.fi/static/ingres/STARUG.PDF
> for an example of Jim's mega-provider, and at for instance:
> http://www.lc.leidenuniv.nl/awcourse/oracle/server.920/a96540/statements_56a.htm
> for an example of going the rse route.

Good reading, thanks

> At one point in time, the Ingres folks were building Star as a
> separate project. Then they belatedly figured out that Star actually
> contained >80% of the code of a regular Ingres instance and they
> reverted to building it from the same code base. A bit like we build
> Classic and Super from a single code base.
>
> If one thinks it through, it soon becomes apparent that "building a
> mega-provider" and "solving it at the rse level" actually results in
> much the same code design.

I have the same opinion

> So the whole debate around Jim's argument simplifies to:
> - which presentation to the user is easier to understand
> - is calling back into the provider chain from a regular server (using
> all the proper interfaces) 'breaking the architecture' (as compared to
> calling back into the provider chain from a special mega-provider build)?

I don't understand how will be handled query to the foreign data source
contained in stored procedure using mega-provider approach. I.e.

create procedure xxx as
begin

select ...
from localtable, table_from_ds1, table_from_ds2
...
end

> BTW, where did the "quadruple in complexity" insight come from?

Agreed. I also don't see reasons for such hard statement

Regards,
Vlad