A Costly Illusion That Won’t Go Away
by Fabian Pascal 

My point in Irrational Exuberance, which I think Craig Mullins missed in his posted response to my analysis of his article, was that as long as knowledge about fundamentals such as normalization is poor or inexistent (and getting worse due to a “market-driven” dumbing down of the educational system, see The Myth of Market-based Education), there will be no real improvement in technology or products, and there is no reason to expect that poor practices such as denormalization will go away either, as Craig believes. The industry is trapped into poor tools and practices by its own failure to require and reward foundation knowledge. We have been providing ample evidence to that effect at DATABASE DEBUNKINGS, in our papers, books, and seminars.  

Calculating Deciles with Microsoft SQL Server
without Using Temporary Tables
 By Jeffrey McArthur

According to the American Heritage® Dictionary a decile is, "Any one of the numbers or values in a series dividing the distribution of the individuals in the series into ten groups of equal frequency." (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1996). The idea behind deciles, quintiles, and quartiles is to statistically group data into a fixed number of logical categories. The first decile is the value that is greater than a tenth of the data points. (Hand, Mannila, and Smyth, 2001, p. 56).

Architecture of Heterogeneous Concept Space
Managed by non-IT people
By Vladimir Ovchinnikov (ovch@lipetsk.ru)

 
 A data integration system is a system providing a general interface to row of distributed and heterogeneous information systems. The paper proposes an architecture of a data integration system based on Semantically Complete Model with the following distinctions from existent integration approaches: a) the global schema is represented as a flat concept space being transparent for non-IT people; b) creation of GUI view points with query writing can be fulfilled without involving IT people; c) new local schemas and view points are shared automatically among all users as soon as created, administration is not necessary; d) the concept space semantic browsing feature is supported automatically without any programming; e) view points can have very high functionality based on functionality of visual components (grids, charts, trees, graphs, reports, and others), which can be supplied for Concept Space by independent software producers; f) view points support automatically master-detail dependencies defined in the declarative way.

Systems Analysis and RAD:
Interpreting Grammar for Software Development
By Brian S. Smith

This article is the second in a three-part series on how system requirements can be used to accelerate the software development process.

This article takes a closer look at the importance of system requirements for project success, contrasts a requirement-centric approach with Extreme Programming (XP), and explores the potential of natural language processing for systems analysis. The challenges of interpreting English grammar for software development are discussed, along with how rapid application development (RAD) can be achieved from the written word using Deterministic Phraseology (DP).