Tony, great thought provoking article (as we have already seen)

What we really need to define is "traditionalist". A "traditionalist" developer (read mainframer) built everything from a silo perspective. Address the business need and the business need only. "Oh, you want one app to talk to another? Sure, we can develop a translation piece for that". I feel mainframers were bound by the culture they lived/were raised in. A "traditionalist" DBA built everything to be shared. In their "upbringing" there was a great cry for inter-operability. In the spirit of total exposure I am a developer/DBA of the latter tradition. Now we have push back that the silo approach is best.

The problem has always been that neither approach makes everybody happy. The "best" approach has always depended on which side of the road you are looking from.

Second bit (no pun intended):

I don't think a "data bases" that is a "better ORM (Object relational mapping) systems" is saying much. We never have wholesale shifts in paradigm just because marketing says so. Oracle has been saying for many years that their DB is an ORM system. The truth is it can hold objects, not that it relates them. You want the best performance stick to the data base strength, relational not object. No offense intended, but Oracle might just be getting good at it, but they are not great and Oracle is ahead of SQL Server on this front.

Third bit:

Peter, another twenty years in the industry and we will be having this same conversation again, just on a different topic. Not that I have been around for 20 years of industry.