And yes, not all new ideas are good. Not all old ideas are bad. I’m not advocating something crazy like that. I suspect we’re both saying the same things just from two viewpoints…

So, lets have the Old Guard and the Brash Young Lions quit bickering about databases, and reconsider: What worthwhile, valid, awesome, New Thing are we all missing out on that the New Young Lions are going to use to steal our jobs and force us into Management or Non-Coding-Architecture positions?

Is it ever too late to adapt with the times, find value in The Latest Thing, and join the New Young Lions and their technology?

Yeah, there are going to be lots of people out there that have arrogance and ignorance to spare. “This is the way I’ve always done it and I ain’t about to change until, or even if you prove I’m falible.” But that just as equally applies to new developers as it does “old school” ones.

Opening you mind, and ears to experience *and* new ideas leads to brilliant things. Typically this is best accomplished by first shutting one’s mouth.

@Steve: Not having to deal with DBAs telling you how to code: man, you are so lucky As far as justifying the new shiny things: __bring it on!__ I think that’s great. Let’s have rational discussion based on facts, rather than the typical response to something new: “Change Is Scary.”

Applications are the link between data and users. Data is a link between applications. You can’t really justify one without the other. I’m not really sure who you’re trying to blame for holding you back. Sure there’s new approaches and technologies coming up every day, and regardless of what the “old guard” might argue, it’s *your* job to justify *why* the next new thing should be used. It might feel that there’s a lot of resistance, and the focus is to “do things the way that they’ve always been done.” But the simple fact is that this “old guard” put in the time and sweat to justify that back then, those new-fangled concepts were worth it. Respect that, because jumping off a cliff with a new “shiny thing” that’s supposed to let you fly will have disasterous consequences if you forgot to read the instructions first.

As such, it’s no surprise that the data centric mindset exists, or that it continues to exist. The data is where the real value is in most systems, and ignoring that gets you in a lot of trouble eventually.

Could you hand-craft your SQL to provide the most performant solution? Well, of course! And if you want to pay programmers to sit around worrying about that last microsecond, then I guess it’s your money…

Any extra time spent hitting the database is utterly dwarfed by the time spent transmitting your data over the wire to the brower, and then waiting for the browser to render that data. It’s not even close.

Fundamentally, if you want faster web pages, transmit less data.

But, you’re missing the point: you’re still looking backwards. I’m not saying that data-centric is consigned to the history books. I’m asking, what is it that we’re missing now that will be the great flamewars of the next 5 years?

Since the bottle neck in most applications is the storage layer (be it big-table or the traditional RDMS) it seems highly pre-mature to suggest that the Data-Centric view is consigned to the history books.

In fact, due to the increased latency involved when doing stuff on the web, I would argue that the data-centric view has increased in importance. People want pages faster than ever before and to do this they need the fatester performing applications, which in turn requires faster data operations.

The only way to get this increased performance is to make the database do less – and that requires less OOP and more data centric code.