Subject: Paul Graham on Databases

From: Shlomi Fish <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 26 Mar 2005 19:43:20 +0200

In his advice for college students:

http://www.paulgraham.com/college.html

Paul Graham says:

<<<
"Serious" applications like databases are often trivial and dull technically 
(if you ever suffer from insomnia, try reading the technical literature about 
databases) 

That's an interesting statement. From what I know, implementing databases is a 
very challenging task, which requires a lot of hard work. Database 
implementations are certainly not trivial and dull technically. The evidence 
is that there are several open-source database projects that involve the 
effort of many people, and a lot of work has been invested of them and still 
is, and incorporate many interesting techniques and algorithms.

So what is the basis of Graham's statement? Gut feeling? Prejudice?

Regards,

	Shlomi Fish

---------------------------------------------------------------------
Shlomi Fish      [email-masked]
Homepage:        http://www.shlomifish.org/

Hacker sees bug. Hacker fixes bug.

---

From: Arik Baratz <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 27 Mar 2005 19:50:25 +0200

On Sat, 26 Mar 2005 19:43:20 +0200, Shlomi Fish <[email-masked]> wrote:
[snip]
> So what is the basis of Graham's statement? Gut feeling? Prejudice?

I suggest you email him and ask. Why let us guess?

Some of my best friends are databaase programmers.

-- Arik

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From: Tzahi Fadida <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 27 Mar 2005 20:27:57 +0200

Yes, and the science develops all the time. There is room for
improvement
and contrary to common belief, there is room for innovation.
I personally work on a new algorithm that makes possible what was
suggested 40 years ago and just now becomes feasible.
Its painstaking but it is interesting.
I am on the postgresql-hackers list and the people there seems to be
mainly implementation guys and less academic but every once in a while
they come up with new ways to improve the run times of queries and
caching policy just by empirical trials, guesswork and commonsense.
Yes, its indeed still interesting.

Regards,
	tzahi.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Arik Baratz [mailto:[email-masked]] 
> Sent: Sunday, March 27, 2005 7:50 PM
> To: [email-masked]
> Subject: Re: [hackers-il] Paul Graham on Databases
> 
> 
> 
> On Sat, 26 Mar 2005 19:43:20 +0200, Shlomi Fish 
> <[email-masked]> wrote: [snip]
> > 
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