Red Squirrel Reflections Dave Hoover explores the psychology of software development

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From Cockburn to Mathiassen to Fowler to OO Databases
Friday, June 6, 2003

After finishing A Pattern Language, I read Alistair Cockburn's incredible PhD dissertation. It provided me with a much better framework for my research, and opened my eyes to some of his earlier papers that I am finding very interesting. It also introduced me to Lars Mathiassen's Reflective Systems Development, which I have started reading. I have high hopes that Mathiassen's work will play well with Weick and Roberts collective mind theory.

At the same time, I'm reading Martin Fowler's Patterns of Enterprise Architecture, which is excellent, though the more I read it, the more I like the idea of object-oriented databases. When I think of the amount of resources spent on mapping objects to relational databases, it's mind boggling. I am definitely idealistic and naive, but I don't understand why OO databases aren't more mainstream. It just seems like such an unbelievable waste to spend so much time and money on O/R mapping when it provides so little real business value.

Replies: 1 Comment

I think one reason relational databases have done so well is that the focus was on reducing or eliminating duplicate data. I guess this is one of those times where software actually *was* designed with maintenance in mind.

Posted by Darrell on 10/13/2003

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