Well then, I hope you have a better idea for a presentation. They are
somewhat rare at the moment.

Alexey Toptygin wrote:
> On Wed, 11 Feb 2009, Ed Kohlwey wrote:
> 
>> I could have said "if you ascribe to the notion that cloud computing is
>> an increasingly dominant factor in the computer industry, and you plan
>> on working for a company that produces web applications, does scientific
>> computing, or produces any other application involving distributed data
>> and/or processing of data then this presentation is a must!" That might
>> have been a little more specific, but I think I fell asleep half way
>> through writing it. The bottom line is that a lot of people think that
>> this kind of data distribution strategy will become increasingly common
>> in the computer industry, so it's relevant to our audience.
> 
> No, see, that's exactly what I disagree with. Being a DBA is a
> _specialty_, one that, in my experience, less than 5% of computer
> professionals work in. Is it useful to know how drizzle works and how to
> configure it? Yes. Do you have to know how it works in order to use it?
> No! Chances are that if you're a drizzle (or any other non-trivial DB)
> user, then you need to know 1) SQL and 2) an API such as perl's DBI. You
> usually don't need to know or care about the back end, because there is
> a DBA whose job it is to think about these things, which you don't have
> time to think about because you're too busy doing development, or
> sysadminning or QA or whatever.
> 
>> BTW, now that you've weighed your two cents in you're obligated to come
>> to the presentation and debate the technical merits of the application
>> during our discussion period. :)
> 
> Nope, sorry. I don't know the relative technical merits of various SQL
> databases, and I would not be able to learn them well enough to be a DBA
> without spending several years learning. I claim that I don't have to
> know these things, and neither does any computer professional that does
> not intend to be a DBA.
> 
>             Alexey

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