"Extortionist Database Architecture"

For some time now I've been talking about how the whole world of database/business/financial software is incredibly messed up. The whole system is just a morass of consultants trying to sell you crappy software that will end up costing you 10x as much in consulting fees.

But apparently there's a term for this: "Extortionist Database Architecture." Check out an interview with Vivek Ranadive of Tibco where he talks about it.

The first part of the article is really great - it frames the problem perfectly - but the rest descends into marketese. It mostly tries to sell us SOA as the answer to everything, which seems to me to be, er, unlikely. (The article is sponsored by Sun.)

The Harrah's example is especially evil, because the hard part of implementing the story he describes isn't the software at all; it's deciding which triggers should cause which reactions. If you could do that, you could build it on just about any architecture.

In other silver-bullet related news...

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How can you go wrong? <bonk>