Confessions of an IT Manager_Phil Factor

94 The March of Technology
got the complexity treatment. It is so easy to be obliging and add stuff in. The
great skill is in keeping the product simple at the same time. One can imagine it
happening. Some persuasive guy contacts Microsoft, suggesting a feature and,
without checking if it is already there, a team gallops around in all directions
developing a splendid do-it-yourself technology with a new TLA, that ends up
being little more than an invitation to program the feature yourself: when all
that was really required was a button."
"And there, frantically rushing around, trying to keep up are the DBAs and
Database Developers. You give them the choice between a database like SQL
Server 2000 that is complicated, but works and does the job they want, and one
that is wildly complicated, but works and does the job they want, and then are
surprised when they want to stick with the one that is merely complicated."
Bill looked at me impatiently. It was obvious that he'd heard this line of talk
many times before. "OK," he said wearily, "So where next? What can one do
about it?"
In a blinding flash, it all became clear to me; the vision of a product that hid
its complexity behind a simple logical interface to the data. Here was a product
where Microsoft no longer needed to tell us to do our own programming to get
the features we needed. Here was a SQL engine that could be described in a
short book, probably written by Joe Celko, or Bill Stanek.
I was about to tell Bill how to go about it when I felt myself being shaken,
and the veil of sleep lifting. "Stop! Stop!" I shouted, "I must tell Bill what to
do!"
The next moment I was awake in my chair, eyes glazed, textbook still open
in my lap. My wife was standing over me, looking at me severely, and asking
who this 'Bill' was, who ought to be told what to do. In panic I tried to recall
what it was I was going to tell him. Surprisingly, I managed to recall at least a
part of the advice that I had to offer.
All data objects, whether Word files, Excel files, XML, relational databases,
text files, HTML files, registry files, LDAPs, Outlook and so on, are really
relational databases, spanning the spectrum of metadata complexity. All we
need to do is to build on all the ideas of ODBC and JDBC to provide the same
logical interface to all of them. If we can do that, then SQL Server can treat
them all the same logical way, as linked databases, and extract the metadata,
create the entities and relationships in the same way, and use the same SQL
syntax to interrogate, create, read, write and update them.
The complexity would be in the implementation, hidden from the poor DBA
and developer. He would just know that he could create a Word, Access, XML
or Excel file in the same easy way he could create a SQL Server database, and