It is interesting that people see Fabian Pascal's postings as arrogant.

I, for one, do not see them as such.

He states his facts and asks others to prove their statements when they disagree with him. Most often they can not rebut him on the technical points of his argument.

Then the next step is to say that his ideas will not work in "the real world." Again this statement is made without any proof. As I've mentioned here before, I've implemented a web application built on a 3rd normal form database with real time access to it. No performance issues at all! The users' comment was that it was the "cleanest" application that they had seen. (It also had zero bugs during its lifetime!) Wouldn't have been as clean without it being a 3rd NF database. Also, this was before I had visited Pascal's site and heard about the evils of nulls. Strangely enough, my database design contained very few null columns. Most tables had only required fields. A similar, but simpler project, that denormalized the database for "performance" turned out to be much slower. (An attempt to convert it to a Java Based application was a total failure.)

My real world experience strongly supports Fabian Pascal's views. Hence I am very sympathetic to his ideas.

Is Mr. Pascal bitter? Yes, he is. So would anyone be who is a master of his subject yet sees others denigrating him merely because they do not understand what he is saying. His comments about the sorry state of affairs in the software world is very accurate.

Vitriol from Fabian Pascal? What a strange idea! There is as much vitriol from others towards him, if not more.

Regarding Access and MySQL, many people consider a spreadsheet as a database and use it as such. That does not make a spreadsheet a relational database. Access and MySQL are databases, but not relational by any stretch of my imagination. I would not use either if given a choice. I like PostgreSQL though.

Ravi