Today’s Data Management Links
Dr. Peter Chen and Old Kingdom Africa
Ah, yes… it is stranger than fiction. The real world is controlled by an imperial king, named rex—do see the relationship between real and rex such that the ‘rex world’ is the ‘real world’? No? You still deeply invested in real rex estate? Well perhaps you do not have access to the entity relationship between ‘real’ and ‘rex.’ According to Dr. Peter Chen his groundbreaking development of the Entity Relationship Model was too hard to reach in the English language. As of today, you can hear him on a video for Microsoft crediting the Chinese languages and Ancient Egyptian as the sources of his inspiration (this is toward the end of the video). Yet again, it pains me when the Negroes of the “real world” have difficulty relating the wisdom of the Old Kingdom with what’s happening in the technical space right now. Microsoft is about to release a product in the year 2008 that owes its very existence to the ancient non-European world.
Most of the people reading the words in the previous paragraph will respond to them in a manner similar to the Channel9 crew at Microsoft when Dr. Peter Chen invoked the words China and Egypt—they said nothing. As a young student of Africa this would have made me angry but now, at my ripe old age before 40, the foremost issue is that of a lack of imagination and very little outright racism (but very little outright racism goes a long way). Also, I am old enough to understand that the cultivation of conceptualization takes time—it takes uninterrupted time—and very few “civilizations” on earth have such time—especially when there is so much war to be and fight. So this is not a matter of ancient African or ancient Chinese “superiority.” This is a matter of the environmental conditions setting the stage for natural human development. Both Africa and China have degraded into a myriad of imperial/missionary societies as they struggle for “equality”—so much for “superiority.” I encourage you to read at least the first five pages of The Entity-Relationship Model—Toward a Unified View of Data. This paper, from 1976*,* reads like a spec used directly by Microsoft to take us back to the future.
The Entity Framework Is “Huge”
No, I still don’t think you understand: the Entity Framework is “huge,” according to Kevin Hoffman in “LINQ to Entities vs. LINQ to SQL—What should I use and when?” Importantly, he explains the difference between LINQ to SQL and LINQ to Entities. I’m still studying Hibernate mind you but my instincts tell me that LINQ to Entities exceeds Hibernate in functionality. It definitely meets Hibernate as it has HQL and LINQ to Entities will have EntitySQL. The existence Entity SQL implies that LINQ to Entities is DBMS independent. Huge! Kevin Hoffman writes, “LINQ to Entities allows me to write C# LINQ queries that run against a conceptual data model. This is huge. I cannot stress enough to you how unbelievably forward-thinking and useful it is to be able to run queries against a conceptual object model as opposed to a database schema.”
Dr. Peter Chen’s Entity Framework Delayed
Back in April Fabrice Marguerie announces, “ADO.NET Entity Framework not in Orcas.” This allows me to concentrate on LINQ to SQL and more value is added to the already valuable Nuggets from Mike Taulty covering LINQ to SQL—start with “Introduction to LINQ to SQL.”