Ted Neward responded to the comments in my post about the OR/M Smackdown.

A few of the comments to my post had an unpleasant tinge to them with regard to Ted, and after listening (just today!) to the podcast, I have to say that I disagree with them.

I think that the debate took an unforeseen approach (which may have made it less exciting to listen to) in that it didn't rehash all the old OR/M vs. SP debates*, but instead focused on stuff (that at least to me) that is not really discussed much. As a result, much of the discussion focused on points of failure for each approach in most applications.

I think that such a discussion cannot really be settled to one side or the other, especially since it looks like the major differences between Ted an me is where we would draw the line in where to move from one approach to the other. There is a big difference there, but it is a matter of a value judgement, more than anything.

As someone who is deeply involved with OR/M, it was interesting to hear about the approaches from db4o and the other 2nd generation OODBS, even though I still have my doubts about such systems. You can check here for some of the details. I would be interested in learning how versioning, refactoring, deployment, scaling, optimization, etc applies to an OODBS project, but I am already slicing time to minutes, I don't really have the time to do more. (If you are interested in hiring my company for a project that uses an OODB system, taking into account that I have 0 experiance with them, I would be delighted to here about it :-) ).

When I listened to the podcast today, I kept think ,"Oh, I wish that I said XYZ", and then I listened to myself saying something to that affect. Overall, I am very pleased with the "smackdown", although it may have been less of  a smackdown than anticipated.

A few things about what I have to term "logistics" because I can find no better words for it. I don't like how I sound when I speak English, I think much clearer than I can speak, and I am sorry for all those whom I subjected to my English. Both Ted and I have interrupted each other when we had something that had to be said, but Ted sounds so much smoother when he does it... I can understand (although I disagree) why it was thought that he tried to highjack the conversation.

As Ted mentioned, barely an hour before that, I was reminded that gesturing with the hand that holds the mike is not very productive for good sound quality, I listened to that advice, switched hand, and immediately started gesturing with that hand. I probably need more experience there as well.

To conclude, I had great time participating in the debate, and I would like to thanks Carl & Richard for supplying us with the chance to make it.

P.S: And for those who wanted solid truths, I have the consultant answer to you: It Depends.

P.S.S: I have seen the object models that Ted talks about them, that make my 31,438 tables DB looks almost (but not quite) ordinary.

* Sorry Ken, ain't going to bite this one again.