ObjectsInstancesRelationshipsConnections

An exploration through the world of Objects, instances; Relationships and connections.

Friday, January 13, 2006

OiRc-0009 Seeing Views intelligently (+ off-topic)

Views, in the database world, are selected snippets of table definitions and SQL which may be used to retrieve some tables' rows and any, uh, related, table rows (by foreign keys and/or through the execution of the SQL associated with the view) into a new table with its columns filled by the retrived rows.

The problem with views is that its is hard to know exactly what is being retrieved or from where.

For retrieval, this is sort of excusable.

Human beings seem to possess an almost infinite capacity for stomping all over objects and relationships, flattening these out and creating a new mental construct to deal with the resultant smear.

That is why human languages are so imprecise. That's also why we end up talking and writing at length when we have nothing to say; and then get other people to agree.

Its the old problem of "I know you think you understand you heard but I don't think you realize that what I said was not what I meant."

Precise communication, or more precisely sloppy but comprehensible communication, is scarcely possible with things like an insufficient alphabet, like Hebrew which was/is written without any vowels, or diacritical marks, like English which is written one way and pronounced any which way.

The real reason the Jewish world places such importance on rabbinical studies is that the transmission of historical texts is part of an oral process required by their lousy vowel-less alphabet. I'm sure I could find other examples. I'm staying far, far away from ideogramatic languages like Chinese, Japanese, Korean and others.

The lack of diacritical marks leads to wars and jokes. The joke amongst translators and interpretors in that "In French, you can know how to speak and write any word without ever knowing what it means, while in English, you can know the meaning of a word without having a clue how to speak or write it."

I suspect that the (dis)ability to construct an alphabet without properly diacritically marked vowels is the same (dis)ability that afficts anyone looking at a photomicrograph of a VLSI chip.

The people are all looking for the transistors and shit while the real wonder, the traces, the incredible wealth of the traces, is glossed over as "Well, that's just a trace."

Ahem! The original inventors of the transistors, Robert Noyce, who was at Fairchild Semiconductor and Jack Kilby, who was at Texas Instruments, got rich and famous, not because of their work with components, but because they found a solution to the inter-connection problem.
(Image copyright Jean Hoerni and Robert Noyce.)

In fact, the component doesn't matter, nor does the composition of the component; it doesn't matter if you're looking at a germanium transistor or a silicon resistor. I seriously doubt that anyone reading this, or listening on the podcast, could tell the difference.

What is common, invariant and yet overwhelmingly flexible is the trace from one component to another, or to nothing. People have been ignoring the very thing that has made the biggest impact on modern civilization.