I think that it is very context dependent. Think of it this way:

You have an instrument monitoring something, it is remote. You poll it every hour. In the first 10 hours you get some values. One of those values is zero (0) and that is a valid value for that particular measurement. In second 10 hours you notice you have some null's. Should I interpret those as zero or should I interpret those as no data acquired ?

I do know that Oracle will not count null values when doing any kind of averaging.

As someone who is a programmer, but had never had an Apple Desktop or Laptop until my wife and son got me one for Christmas this pas year I have to say X-Code needs more polish.

I say this because I was / Am a heavy user of Delphi ( Yup Object Pascal ). You might think OP is a toy but you could not be more wrong, but that is another argument. What I can say definitively is that Borland and now Embarcadero know how to do an IDE better then just about anything I have ever seen.

Apple needs to take a page out of their playbook. In Delphi when you add a component to a form, it adds ALL the code that you need to the unit that is handling the form. A simple double click on the element adds the code shell for that particular action, either from the object browser or from the form. You simply write the code that makes that action do what it needs to do, nothing else.

Now contrast this with X-Code... It will let you drag a component onto a form, in iOS Mavericks or whatever, but after that you have to and start screwing around in .h files, adding this adding that just so that element will be recognized and will compile. Couple that with the syntax of Objective C and you have a program that can only be written by someone who fairly in-depth knowledge of Objective C. I mean not they should not have to have that knowledge but it should not be a requirement to do basic forms and the like.

As it is mentioned, using the "Story Board" concept you can only write very simple apps that don't accomplish a whole lot. So while Apple is getting there they have a lot of ground to cover.

The film did its level best to condense a really great book into 90 minutes. The actors were genuine, they really got into it and they took some of the themes and made them poignant yet not overly so.

While it will never be among the worlds best movies, it really did better than I have ever seen trying to take a book like HGTTG and give it cinematic life.

And their use of actual costumes ( created by the late Jim Hensen's company ) was so MUCH better than CGI. All in all it was a good film.

A small problem with your idea. Who is "you" ? So if an author enters into an agreement to have his book made into a movie by say, The Disney Company who is the "content creator"? Is it the author? The screen writer?, The shareholders in Disney Stock? The CEO of Disney?

Lets say for instance you arcademan come up with a really cool video game that seems to be an absolute hit. Do you have the resources to put up a server farm that can distribute that content to the masses? Let's say I do and I put my considerable resources to work on your behalf for some fee per distributed unit. I really have no sure way of knowing if you will sell 100, 1000, 10000 or even a million units. So I want an exclusive agreement because I have made those resources available to you and therefor have tied those up.

I do not know either. Backwards compatibility perhaps? I do know that if you have written code and have used bit mapping ( INT AND 0xA23F4D ) and things like that you will more then likely run into to trouble ( in theory it should not matter since the number of bits is not shrinking ) when your INT goes from 32 bits to 64 bits and the same thing goes if you using any ROT commands so who knows.

I am quite sure that this is true in a lot of spaces and I am quite sure the opposite is true in a lot of spaces.

That brings up another point though. Tuning a database... This is seeming to be a lost art. Over time I have witnessed what I think is an alarming trend of otherwise mostly competent developers wanting the database to just be a magic box. So much code has been written to hide the database, to turn it into objects that match oop models. Pick any of them, springDB, Hibernate et all. No one wants to recognize the database as being an integral part of a well thought out and balanced system. They simply want to throw a framework in front of it an attempt to ( poorly IMHO ) make it non existent when IMHO is the best place to implement the vast majority of business rules, but that is another discussion.

But back to your main point. As I said, if Oracle just sucked as a database it would not have the market share that it does and if DB2 ( a mighty fine DB in its own right ) was that much faster and better then it would have a much larger market share then it does. Each DB has it's own set of strengths and weaknesses and each one has its sweet spot.

I don't usually feed the trolls so I am so very sorry to put a damper on your rant, but it is far from dead.

I can't disagree with that statement, but for the other 10% there really is no substitute for Oracle. Like I said in my original post PG may eclipse Oracle and that will be OK. In the mean time use what works for the situation as there are many choices, many that are good, many that are not so good and we as software professionals get paid to advise the right course for the write set of tasks. One thing we are all guilty of though is retreating to our comfort zones and like it or not we weight all of those decisions with out own particular set of likes and dislikes.

Happy to share, and I have posted a link as well.

So every SQL database, Oracle included, has to have some way of keeping transaction order, which is to say which transaction got there 1st, 2nd, 3rd etc. This is part of ACID and it cannot be ignored. Oracle and others solved the problem by using a synthetic number. Oracle's "number" type is not a recognized IEEE standard like an INT or a FLOAT, DOUBLE etc. It i stored using a proprietary scheme in the DB that Oracle guarantees to be correct when it is accessed and it is completely portable. The last estimate I saw ( I rarely look ) was that pushing Oracle to its absolute limits was that it would take ~ 141 years to wrap around. Personally I am not going to be alive then and I doubt Oracle will be either.

In postGres they use a 32 bit unsigned int to keep tract of this. Now 2^32 is 4,294,967,296 transactions, which is a very large number indeed, but when you get into extremely hi volume transaction environments this can get used up pretty fast, like in a few days fast! Since the number is unsigned and postGres is written in C ( although I don't think it matters ) when you hit INT MAX it wraps back to 1!!! and that is a disaster. In older versions it just kept going and corrupting your data and there was really no way out of it, you were just hosed. In the latest version, the database will only go so far and it will force itself down before it wraps around AND will refuse to come up until the vacuum process is complete. On VERY large tables this can take days!

Now the guys who write PG are no dummies. They recognized this and came up with a process called VACUUM, it does many things and it will reset the TXID and keep you safe. In most every application this is fine. In Extreme transaction environments where you build up billions of rows very quickly you have to set the VACUUM process to it's most aggressive level to keep up with inbound transactions and it just kills performance and your TX rate falls into the basement.

This link explains it better than I can. PostGres Wrap Around Problem

Hey, so I am going let the invective roll right on by...

Is Oracle a huge turd throwing ape? That is not an unfair analogy and in some ways I agree with you.

I have been in the database business for a very long time and I have watched them come and go. Some self destructing and others just fading into obscurity but the one thing that I have observed over the years is that the database is pretty much at the heart of anything non trivial. There are only TWO RDBMS's that have stood the test of time and that is Oracle and DB2.

That is a good because something that important cannot be flavor of the month like so many programming languages and frameworks are these days.

In a perfect world we would have infinite choice and they all would work as good as the other and software patents would not exist. Sadly, Elvis isn't making records anymore and there is no Santa Clause.

But here is the problem...

You cannot deny that he built a huge empire on something as banal as a database. Arguably the best RDBMS pretty much ever and where is the competition?

I use Oracle extensively. I am a DBA and of all the alternatives out there ( and I have tried most of them ) the only thing that comes even close is DB2 with postGres running a close third and depending on your POV, catching up fairly quickly. Perhaps postGres will eclipse Oracle one day, but not unless they get some serious money behind the project and that probably won't happen because no one wants to pump the millions of dollars it would take into a project that cannot even fix the TXID problem, and make no mistake about it, it is a problem. Also if someone dumps that kind of money into a project they expect some kind of ROI. There might be a few white knights that have that kind of money but they are few and far between and most can find more worthy causes to spend that kind of money on. Don't get me wrong, postGres is a fine DB but it has some faults that make it not so attractive.

Larry understands how to stitch technology together around a DB better than most anyone else I have seen. Arguably Microsoft gets it, but they are stuck running in the windows universe which despite a lot of progress is still broken. You cannot run MS-SQL Server across hundreds of Intel machines and expect it to hold together, but they ave built and end to end ecosystem and MS-SQL Server is tightly integrated, but you can't drop it on a Z-Series mainframe under either IBM's native OS or Linux. PostGres has the same problem but they are moving to fix that, but I am not sure they really understand the problem. Of the other DB's out there ( Mongo, Hadoop, et all. ) that you can do that with, they don't support things like ACID which, like it or not, is pretty much a requirement in way to many situations.

The facts speak for themselves. If Oracle really sucked as a Database it would not be in the vast number spaces that it occupies. You can cap on Larry Ellison all you want, question his lineage, say he is an ego maniacal asshole, but you have to give the man his due. He built a company that does have the answer to almost all the spaces where a DB matters and he built a business that relentlessly pursues those spaces to the betterment of their stock holders and 98% of the people and organizations that use their products.

This is really great for doing cpu intensive jobs but what seems to never get any love is moving massive amounts of data around. We need to put as much effort into buss bandwidth as we are with cpu's.