Maybe there is an assumption within the community that the Next Great Leap will be an extension of the Relational Model. I'd certainly like to believe that. It would be nice to have a fully functional system, similar to the one Date and Darwen describe in The Third manifesto, even if I have to forget SQL and learn some flavor of D (D#?).

But I'm also afraid that reason doesn't drive the market and too often hype and hope become substitutes for critical thinking. The fact that we're still talking about the object-relational impedence mismatch is telling. The momentum is to appease the development community with tools that make relational constructs look more like objects.

So, we should probably take a lesson from those folks (Date, Darwen, Pascal, etc.) who have argued from positions of theoretical strength, and argue from a marketing viewpoint instead; going from a stand that says "I won't buy this unless it has true relational support" which the vendors know isn't true, to a stand that says "I'd buy more of this if it had true relational support", which will light up the fires of avarice and potentially provide us with better systems.

Sorry, having a completely cynical day. Please feel free to ignore. 🙂