Religous Argument and Ad Hominem Attacks (Score 1)

The argument of "Relational or Not" has the same religious overtones that the "Perl vs. Python" or "Emacs vs. VI" or "Linux vs. Windows" or "Democrat or Republican" arguments take. At the end of the day it is a subjective opinion and a personal choice made for personal reasons. One would hope that people would the better tool for the job.

There is also the little issue -- that many have pointed out -- of needing to get work done. IF (and that is a big if) we all were to accept the premise that a truly relational model is the end all be all data model, it fails to address the fact that such an implementation is much more cumbersome: it takes more programming, more SQL, more time. And in the business world time is money and money matters.

In the article to which this slashdot story is linked, Pascal says:

Note: Participants in the thread use aliases rather than real names. So much for the courage of their convictions.

That would be a circumstantial ad hominem attack. In fact his first bullet point response to the post is more straw man and ad hominem attacks. Certainly many of the posters on slashdot do the same but to get in a pissing match with fallacious arguments adds nothing meaningful to the debate and is probably counterproductive.

Pascal's writing are littered with fallacious arguments. Take for example from his original "No Integrity: A Systemic Problem" article on dbazine.com where he starts a paragraph with "As long as inferior nonrelational products are bought...". Throwing the "inferior" word in there is begging the question and it is a loaded word. All of this is quite unfortunate because there is some useful information sprinkled in his articles. Just like it is good for a programmer to know both functional and object oriented programming, it is good to know about the relational data model.