Donna,

Although this is a reply to another post on El Reg today, it is just as relevant to your own.

Source in the RAW ....... Star Adjustable MetaDataBase Material/Content Feed.

By amanfromMars

Posted Tuesday 19th February 2008 10:12 GMT

"Those that made use of normalization to create an underlying warehouse that then fed targeted data marts - which are implemented as stars typically - not only had terrific performance, but were well understood, documented and testable." .... By Highlander Posted Tuesday 19th February 2008 07:57 GMT

With "which are implemented as stars typically" being the all important Bit/Byte, Highlander. In that context, I wouldn't disagree.

However, all Information does not come from normalized databases/fed warehouses targetting data marts, some is Mined/Sourced/Fed into Systems by Stars of Analytical Programming who Really understand XXXXactly the impact of what they design/implement.

And so as not to overly confuse the Herd Mentality, and to give them every Chance at Simple Comprehension, they would keep IT all in Plain Text so that IT could be easily Transcribed and/or XXXXPorted into any Intelligence Community and/or Intelligent Learning Society.

http://comments.regdeveloper.co.uk/2008/02/18/stonebraker_dbms_outdated/

The most common complaint I hear about data architects is their pompous use of the word "architect". What if I was to go around declaring myself to be a "code surgeon" or a "html high-court judge". Get over yourselves you DB monkeys.

Then go explain an ERM to a Board of Directors. I'm *sure* they'll understand it like they understand most IT proposals--without a dictionary and several hours of explaining the harder terms.

[Taxi] <---< [Coat] <---< [Me]

It is not just DBA's, the whole IT is in denial. Life (==business) is not IT but making money. Until IT is a separate utility / service function, which has only business relationships and people who liaison between, it better to talk business language, not technology babble. Even inside IT it is sometimes difficult to find same terms, is it then no wonder that people outside don't understand those ever changing, millions of acronyms and different ways to show how it works. And it works another way round too - half of my work is to find why these nicely modeled, fully normalized and even formally tested databases have no performance when business functions change as they do almost day by day. In business a nice, static diagram is good a week - if you are lucky, world goes on.