An article over on techworld.com reports that Microsoft will offer data modeling support in Visual Studio called Microsoft Entities :

The ADO team's ADO.Net Entities moves the data model up from the physical structure of relational tables to a "data model that more accurately represents business entities such as 'Customer' or 'Order' that could map to multiple relational tables and views," said S. "Soma" Somasegar, corporate vice president of the developer division at Microsoft. His blog is frequently a source of insight into what is going on at Microsoft.

A preview of Entities is due before the end of this year, and it will be in the Orcas version of Visual Studio.

Entities will allow developers to define complex mapping to relational data, enabling development of new business structures when the data schema cannot be changed, Somasegar said.

To me, though, this sounds more like functionality that DBMS vendors put on top of their engines in the mid-Eighties to make them look and feel more relational. 

What's really going to frustrate me when this comes out is all the conversations that go like this:

Me:  So if you look at the CUSTOMER entity, you c.....

Bob:  Uh, that's not an entity.

Me:  Are you saying that you believe it should be split? Or combined with another entity?

Bob:  I'm saying that you don't know what you are talking about, that's not an ADO .Net Entity..

Me:  Yes, this is a data model, not a ....

Bob:  Nope, that's not what a data model is.

Me:  Uh...not again.

I guess though, that since they chose not to call it ADO .Net Classes, at least they are admitting that classes and entities are not the same thing.  And perhaps that by wanting to appear to be more business-oriented, they believe that there is some value in business modeling and understanding business rules. Maybe.

Like all good web-mistresses, I check our logs on a regular basis to see which search terms are used to get to our sites.  I do get some terms that I expect, such as modeling tools, data model, data modeling, etc.  But one of the top 5 search terms on a regular basis is MMOPN32.exe or MMOPN.

Those of you that use ERwin will recognize this as the executable for ERwin Data Modeler, at least it is for earlier versions.

I wonder if the reason that this is such a common term is that people are seeing this in an error message or a Zone Alarm warning and they want to know what it is.

If you reached our site by searching for MMOPN32.exe, could you let me know why you are searching on this term.  For the most part, I'm just curious.

Oh, and from what I can remember, if you are getting an error, try renaming c:\winnt\erwin40.ini  and restarting.  You may want to reboot.  And get upgraded to a new version :).

What do the following sentences have in common?

Long mad detail.  Late, mild gonad.  Gloat idled man. Aligned, mad lot.  Managed IT doll.   Get dial old man.  Get laid old man. God! tall maiden. Leading, mad lot.

... read about them in our article Semantics, Schemantics.

I've added a quick data management crossword to our Fun Page.  If you have words and clues to supply, let me know.   This crossword uses java, so you may have to allow for active script on the page in order to play.

Send your words and clues to website@infoadvisors.com.

From our Book Study of Chris Date's Database in Depth:

I thought that this was a good point in Chapter 1, about why we need to study the foundation upon which our profession is based:

The point about principles is this: they endure. By contrast, products and technologies (and the SQL language, come to that) change all the time—but principles don’t. For example, suppose you know Oracle; in fact, suppose you’re an expert on Oracle. But if Oracle is all you know, then your knowledge is not necessarily transferable to, say, a DB2 or SQL Server environment (it might even get in the way of your making progress in that new environment). But if you know the underlying principles—in other words, if you know the relational model—then you have knowledge and skills that will be transferable: knowledge and skills that you’ll be able to apply in every environment and that will never be obsolete.

So we've all probably studied a bit about normalization, perhaps some about surrogate keys, primary keys, and the specific syntax of our DBMS's implementation of SQL, but have we studied those tool and vendor independent topics that allow our skills to be transferable?

I thought that I had a clear distinction in my mind until I sat down one day to work in Oracle.  I needed to get some sample data out of an Oracle database and I normally do this by building a query, then limiting it to the TOP 100 rows.  Guess what?  TOP 100 works just fine in SQL Server, but Oracle doesn't have a clue what to do with that syntax.  It seemed so straight forward to me...

Date goes on to say:

Although it’s certainly possible to use SQL relationally (for the most part, at any rate), sometimes you’ll find—because existing implementations are so far from perfect—that there are severe performance penalties for doing so...in which case you might more or less be forced into doing something not "truly relational" (like writing a query in some weird and unnatural way in order to get the implementation to use an index). However, I believe very firmly that you should always make such compromises and trade-offs from a position of conceptual strength. That is:

• You should understand what you’re doing when you do have to make such a compromise.

• You should know what the theoretically correct situation is, and you should have very good reasons for departing from it.

• You should document those reasons, too, so that if they go away at some future time (for example, because a new release of the product you’re using does a better job in some respect), then it might be possible to back off from the original compromise.

The following quote—which is attributed to Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) and is thus some 500 years old!—sums up the situation admirably:

Those who are enamored of practice without theory are like a pilot who goes into a ship without rudder or compass and never has any certainty where he is going. Practice should always be based on a sound knowledge of theory.

(OK, I [Date] added the italics.)

I think that is a brilliant quote, and this position (Practice should always be based on a sound knowledge of theory.) forms the beginning of every professional career, except for IT. 

Where are your foundations?  In a three ring binder that you threw out to make way for the newest set of language references for you DBMS?  In a help file?  Still looking for them?