I briefly scanned my bookshelves for a book meeting schoen's criteria. I think I might have one, A Theory of Objects, M. Abadi, L. Cardelli (contributor).

Staring at the spines also reminded be of a strange 'standard' that I do not know the origin of. All English books (i.e. books published in English) have titles printed _down_ the spine - you tilt your head to the right to see the text 'right side up'. All Russian, German and Bulgarian books have titles printed going _up_ the spine. Bizarre.

ACID flames

There's a minor inferno on slashdot about MySQL and transactional support (and MySQL's lack thereof). The article that people are responding are to is not, for the most part, factually inaccurate but it sets the wrong tone by calling the MySQL developers 'clueless'. In any event, much of the subsequent discussion revolves around whether most applications need transactionallly safe storage. It's hard to argue about 'need' but transactions certainly make most multi-user, concurrent apps much easier to program. A more interesting question is 'do most applications need a relational store?' and by extension 'do most applications need generalized ad-hoc query support?'. I think the answer to the last two questions is 'no' for a many more apps than those that do not need transactionally safe storage. Unfortunately, the most widely available and accepted way to get transactional support is through a relational database. As a consequence an unreasonable amount of time and effort during application development is often spent on RDBMS integration, particularly in cases where the application middle tier is implemented in an object oriented language. Various object-relational mapping products can make this somewhat but not significantly easier. A possible hybrid approach is to use a transactionally-capable, non-relational store (e.g. something built on top of sleepycat) for the apps 'live' data set and periodically extract a relevant subset of the data into an offline RDBMS for 'ad-hoc-query-required' uses - reporting, analysis, decision support, etc. I haven't had a chance to try this approach in a non-trivial, realistic situation yet.