Stating the Obvious and Other Database Writings

Some things seem so obvious that they dont need to be spelled out in detail. Or do they? In computing at least (and probably in any discipline where accuracy and precision are important) it can be quite dangerous just to assume that some given concept is obvious and indeed universally understood. Serious mistakes can happen that way! The first part of this book discusses features of the database field-equality assignment naming-where just such an assumption seems to have been made and it describes some of the unfortunate mistakes that have occurred as a consequence. It also explains how and why the features in question arent quite as obvious as they might seem and it offers some advice on how to work around the problems caused by assumptions to the contrary. Other parts of the book also deal with database issues where devoting some preliminary effort to spelling out exactly what the issues in question entailed could have led to much better interfaces and much more carefully designed languages. The issues discussed include redundancy and indeterminacy; persistence encapsulation and decapsulation; the ACID properties of transactions; and types vs. units of measure. Finally the book also contains a detailed deconstruction of and response to various recent pronouncements from the database literature all of them having to do with relational technology. Once again the opinions expressed in those pronouncements might seem obvious to some people (to the writers at least presumably) but the fact remains that theyre misleading at best and in most cases just flat out wrong.