Erik Meijer, Microsoft: I'm Erik Meijer, I get paid by SQL Server and I work for Visual Basic and C#, so I experience objects and databases everyday and the impedance mismatch.
But what I really want to talk about with you today is about car sales people. All think that you love them, right? You go and buy a car and then they say: "You can get your Corolla and a navigation system or you can get a Prius and your fuel efficient engine." But of course what you want is to have a Sienna and a navigation system and a fuel efficient engine. And the problem we have currently is that we also have this kind of disjunctive normal form for data.
So it's like either you have objects and pointer based traversal or you have objects and foreign key/primary key based traversal.
So how can we get rid of this kind of disjunctive normal form in this ugly world? There are two ways to do that. One is to define a kind of an uber data model that some people try to do and then map everything into that uber data model. Or the other one is to try to unify, to look what is common between all these data models, how can we abstract over each model and over each collection type etc. And this is like where the future will be so I will leave that as cliffhanger for the next round to talk to you about that.
But before that I want to give this -- it's a memorial candle. This is for all the companies that are still looking at the uber model and I'd like to symbolically burn this candle for them as a memorial that they will go down in peace.
