Paul,

I wonder how many people are on the same page as you?:) Apparently

there is a view that VS centric application development(object/entity)

is merely marketing hype. That 'beyond relational' is not grounded

in anything concrete but is merely marketing gibberish. A view that

does not take seriously future consequences of the object model in

what sql server will be. There is a compelling case to be made that

MS, and not just its marketing department, is now divorcing the

relational model (SQL) from application development. That sql server

has now entered into a finshed 'platform'. A platfrom that serves

as a container, a repository, for relational data (tables) yet not

for the relational modelling of data. It will be interesting to see

if the sql community goes about its business as if this is not the case.

The loss of Jim Gray is interesting. I'm not sure exactly what you had

in mind. Jim was a leading proponent of getting away from the relational

model as a basis from application development. If anything he seemed

to be leading the way to new concepts and a different view of the

purpose of sql server. I really don't see him as advancing the relational

model (or sql) for a very long time. The following excerpts from the VS

team reflect what he was currently thinking as well.

Anatomy of the ADO.NET Entity Framework

the ADO.NET Team

SIGMOD’07, June 11–14, 2007, Beijing, China.

http://research.microsoft.com/~melnik/pub/adonet-industrial_SIGMOD07.pdf

'...a higher level data modeling layer has become essential for

applications and data-centric services.'

'A logical (relational) data model aims to capture the entire data

content of the target domain using logical concepts such as tables,

rows, primary-key/foreign-key constraints, and normalization.

While normalization helps to achieve data consistency, increased

concurrency, and better OLTP performance, it also introduces

significant challenges for applications. Normalized data at the

logical level is often too fragmented and application logic needs

to assemble rows from multiple tables into higher level entities

that more closely resemble the artifacts of the application domain.'

'An important goal of the Entity Framework is to make the conceptual

data model (embodied by the Entity Data Model, described in Section 3.2) a

concrete, executable abstraction of the data platform.'

'The Entity Framework introduces a new ―conceptual‖ level based on the

EDM between the relational and the presentation levels. This new

conceptual model describes data at a higher-level of abstraction

than the relational model and its aim is to represent data in terms

that are closer to the programming artifacts used by applications.'

'Most applications and data-centric services would like to reason

in terms of high-level concepts such as an Order, not about the

several tables that an order may be normalized over in a relational

database schema. An order may manifest itself in multiple

fashions—we believe there is no "one proper presentation

model"; the real value is in providing a concrete conceptual

model, and then being able to use that model as the basis for

flexible mappings to and from various presentation models and

other higher level data services.'

Can anyone seriously argue that this is marketing hype? MS is saying

sql is yesterday. They are making use, and will continue to do so, of

sql server in new ways (read the entire paper). What is the message

here for new developers for concentrating on developing sql skills?

What exactly is the place of the sql language itself in EDM? I agree

with you about the debate of our time and the trends you state.

But is anyone listening or really care?:)