del.icio.us/dossy links since February 5, 2007 at 09:00 AM

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Comments

  1. I don’t trust Celko. He had an error in his nested set model for trees that had been duplicated for over ten years before I caught the error, corrected it, and got the most wonderful response, “Shit. You’re right.” It was in books, magazines, emails, forum posts, pretty much anything he touched would have the exact same erroneous examples. The sad thing is that he rarely delves into why the particular queries do what they do.

  2. Havard: Exactly what was the error and is the correction in the latest edition and/or the errata for the publications?

    I never assume that anything I read is completely without error. It is definitely an exercise to the reader to understand the concepts–which means identifying any fallacies or mistakes in them as they’re presented.

    The net effect here is that Joe Celko’s writing describes some very useful techniques that any reasonable programmer ought to learn and understand at some level. Any mistakes in the presentation of such knowledge are mostly irrelevant–as long as you understand the concepts, your own implementation will hopefully not include those mistakes and/or you’ll make your own unique ones. :-)

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