Mole End

So last week the Mole attended the SDForum SAM SIG meeting to hear Ted Neward speak on "State Management: Shape and Storage:
object/relational (O/R) impedance mismatches for persisting
objects between transient & persistent states." This is a topic that has long fascinated the Mole, which, he discovered, is another way of saying that the Mole was not the target audience. Most of the talk was about the problem; the Mole was looking for new insights into the answer.

In the car on the way home, the Mole thought some more about the issues. One of the phrases that had come into his mind during the talk was "locality of reference". It seems to the Mole that the spectrum of distances from the processor core (registers -- cache -- RAM -- disk -- offsite tape) reflects a range of concerns from extremely process-centric to extremely data-centric. An object model is very useful for computing (duh: OO, by definition, couples data with behavior); a relational model is very useful for long-term data storage. One day the Mole will draw a picture and elaborate on this.

The Mole also recommended Fabian Pascal's writings (some of which are specifically relevant) to a couple of people attending the event. The Mole believes Santayana's dictum that "those who do not remember the past are doomed to repeat it."