Informix was bought by IBM in 2001 and is still under active development. Latest release was 3 weeks ago.

He got caught twice. Lord knows how many goosed up quarterly reports went through un-noticed.

High volume ACID transactions and stored procedures.

The tried and true IBM sales strategy. Play golf with the client CEO & CFO. Get IT personnel fired if they don't get on board.

<blockquote> One does not become a billionaire by being a nice fair guy. </blockquote>

No you do it by criminally mis-stating your corporate earnings in order to goose up the quarterly numbers which rug-merchant Larry did twice!

<i>"In other words, try spending as much on actually understanding your data and how it needs to be organized as you do on the thing you plan to store that data in."</i>

Yes and entity-relationaship modeling and a fully normalized logical data model are the tools used to do it in a rigorous fashion.

Moronic. You better believe that transactional integrity is important. Care for an account from a bank whose systems didn't enforce it?

After dealing with Oracle for over thirty years I've learned that the answer to the question "how much does Oracle cost?" is "how much money do you have?"

For a list use LISP.

<blockquote>What if two people share the same address but not the same account?<blockquote>

Then you need an account table, a customer table, and a relational table that contains instances of paired keys from each. Learn some elementary set theory for chrissakes! The article is full of other stupidities as bad as this. /. keeps getting dumber and dumber. "Gee, my My SQL table has too many columns."

I'll bet it does, you nitwit.

Heroin is an effective analgesic for many cancer patients. You have to procure it on the black market. That makes it homeopathy.

No, that was EMACS.

I spent over 30 years specializing in relational database projects for Fortune 100 companies and government agencies. Ingres, Oracle, Postgres, System R, Sybase, M$ SQL Server, DB2 or whatever they call their products now; I didn't discriminate and worked on energy, telecom, finance, and manufacturing projects and my employers didn't give a hoot about my prior industry. It was all applied set theory to me and I always got offers after the overwhelming majority of my technical interviews.

I passed into the three figure per hour realm decades ago and never suffered from lack of work during downturns in the early eighties, 1991, 2001, 2008 or what have you. I took long vacations, socked away scads of dough, and don't work anymore because I invest when I'm not at the beach.

There are still tons of jobs out there for people who understand how set theory and ACID transactions are implemented in databases.

As long as your IQ is a minimum of 130 you shouldn't have any trouble finding work. Just stay away from fads like particular languages and anything that reeks of agile development or use cases and you will be fine. DBA's always have the final say on how crackpot developers will actually store permanent data despite whatever moronic methodology du jour the developers think they are using.

aren't we?

LISP 1.5 too!