Myths and legends It seems there is a disquieting trend in IT: concepts are getting steadily vaguer, and claims harder to verify.

Take web services, for instance. The very name is disingenuous. They are services of a kind, but they don't have much to do with the web. Their key protocol is SOAP, which stands for Simple Object Access Protocol. Well, it is a protocol, all right. But it isn't simple, and it doesn't access objects.

Myths and legends It's early December 1995 and it has been a heady few days for Java. IBM and Adobe Systems have agreed to license this strange and embryonic new software that Sun Microsystems keeps telling us can be "written once and run anywhere".

Two days before, Sun and Netscape had announced JavaScript that - according to the press release - was: "Analogous to Visual Basic in that it can be used by people with little or no programming experience to quickly construct complex applications."

Myths and legends When database folks gather to sup ale and chat, as they invariably will at Oracle's OpenWorld in San Francisco this week, talk occasionally turns to benchmarking. As soon as it does, someone will say: "Of course the trouble is you can't trust the vendors. Wasn't Oracle caught cheating at the TPC benchmarks?"

The public has a right to know the truth...

A bit of nostalgia for you. Cast your minds back to 1999 or thereabouts. Microsoft is finishing off IIS 4.0 and there is no such thing as C# or ASP.NET. However, there are rumours that Microsoft is creating a Java-like platform codenamed "Cool", in the aftermath of a dispute with Sun that was making it impossible to use Java itself. Microsoft denies the rumours.

Database myths and legends (Part 9) In this series we're looking at the myths and legends of the database world - some are true, some false. The myth under the spotlight today is: Bloor Research once produced a report that slammed SQL Server so much that Microsoft had it suppressed.

Database myths and legends (Part 8) In this series we're looking at the myths and legends of the database world; some are true, some false. The myth under the spotlight today is whether Gartner's Magic Quadrant really is magic.

Database myths and legends (Part 7) In this series we're looking at the myths and legends of the database world; some turn out to be true, others false. This myth is about why we use OLAP.

Database myths and legends (Part 6) This is a great example of a myth/legend that is both true and false; it all depends on how you define relational.

Database Myths and Legends (Part 5) Press releases issued by software companies are one of the more common sources of myths and legends in the database world. No real surprise there you may think but therein lies a paradox. We all know that press releases are highly partisan, so we expect everyone to treat them with suspicion; yet we aren’t surprised when they influence opinion, as the following one certainly did.

Database myths and legends (Part 4) In the second myths and legends story we related how the knights of the Good King Bill were accused of stealing secrets from Borland at a conference way back in 1992.

Database myths and legends (Part 3) BI (Business Intelligence) is about extracting information from data and data mining is an important part of that process. Data mining is a process that looks for patterns in data, so in a sense it is like querying the data. The crucial differences between simply querying the data and data mining can be summed up as intent and scale.

Database Myths and Legends "Microsoft was caught stealing secrets from Borland.".

The database world has more myths and legends than the court of King Arthur. The current myths tend to be less about dragons and dungeons and more about features and performance, such as: