Arthur Fuller
fuller.artful at gmail.com
Tue Dec 6 09:27:01 CST 2011
To add to and reinforce your point, even though I have almost all the Data-Architecture tools available (ERwin, PowerDesigner, DeZign, Rational DA, etc.), more often than not I resort to a pencil and paper to lay out the initial sketch. I don't bother describing the columns at this stage -- just the tables and the joins, and I can use the eraser to refine the Rdefs. When DBs are extremely complex (i.e. several hundred tables) then I skip the pencil-stage and go directly to PowerDesigner (my choice) or ERwin (more often the client's choice, despite its inadequacies). But for SMBs, my first choice remains pencil and paper, where I capture the logic. Maybe it's similar to painters who first sketch the landscape in pencil and only afterward return to the studio and the canvas and the palette. Either way, the fact remains that I understand the pencil-UI way more intuitively than anything yet invented, including all of the late Steve Jobs's inventions. Granted, it took a while to learn how to describe a circle and a square and a triangle, and then to write the alphabet, but I learned all that before attending First Grade in school, and would imagine that in these days so do almost all kids. Tangentially relevant and directed to listers with children: I want to recommend at the highest level a book called "A Beginner's Guide to Constructing the Universe" by Michael S. Schneider. You and your children will have 110% fun going through this book, and both of you will end up smarter. Arthur On Mon, Dec 5, 2011 at 7:56 PM, Darryl Collins < darryl at whittleconsulting.com.au> wrote: > Hehehehe.... exactly. All jokes aside, the paperback book is in many > ways a nearly perfect technology. It is a bit like the traditional > mousetrap or the standard design on the traditional dial telephone. Some > designs are sooo close to being optimal there is little advantage in > tweaking them. > > -- Cell: 647.710.1314 Thirty spokes converge on a hub but it's the emptiness that makes a wheel work -- from the Daodejing