J J wrote:
>>
>> I've tended to use Python more functionally than OO. So Lua fits me 
>> better in that regard.
> 
> Have you looked at Haskell?  It is purely functional and amazingly 
> expressive.  Behind smalltalk, it is probably my second favorite at this 
> point.

Yes I have, but not in a while. I do need to revisit it. It looked 
interesting. I asked a few questions on the mailing list. And for the 
project I am currently working on it didn't seem to be the most 
practical tool at that time.

I am doing lots of text processing. A few million objects and several 
gigabytes of text. Constant daily text retrieval and processing.

But I will tell you this much. In this thread you flipped my world 
upside down. :)

I've been spending time thinking about how I wanted to manage all my 
data. Now, I'm not a professional programmer and have no explicit training.

I've avoided RDBMS because I read a lot about the Object Relational 
mismatch in Squeak, Ruby, Python, etc. mailing lists. So how do I store 
my millions of objects, search and access them. I could easily store 
them in files and search via Swish-e. But managing millions of files in 
the file system is kludge. Ugh. So I've been thinking that I'm working 
harder on a kludge than it would be to learn SQL and use PostgreSQL.

And then you write:
"""But this observation is the reason OO databases haven't really taken 
off:  An OO database will tend to model things how *your* application 
wants to see them.  A traditional relational DBA will model things in 
the most generic way he can so that *all* the applications can build the 
view they need easily.  Relational DBA's tend to be of the view point: 
The data will exist for the life of the company, while the applications 
that access it come and go like the tide.  And one only needs to look at 
the huge Java rewrites going on to know they are right."""

This stood out for me:
"""Relational DBA's tend to be of the view point: The data will exist 
for the life of the company, while the applications that access it come 
and go like the tide."""

I've been chewing on that. And it just rang true to me. Wow!!!

And I thought about my entire computing experience. I have all kinds of 
data and documents that I've changed the application accessing them 
many, many times. But the data format is paramount. And as I thought 
about my projects. Still true.

So with that nudge from you, I sit at my desk right now reading one of 
my several SQL books. Thanks. :)

I know for smaller datasets options increase. But I'm feeling good about 
an RDB for this one. Now that I've had a little tweak to my thinking. :)

Thanks again.

Jimmie