"Ebony and Ivory" was a hit single written by Paul McCartney and performed with Stevie Wonder in the early 1980s. It is an interesting song as it is essentially about two things that are poles apart. I was working with a colleague today who is a big Stevie Wonder fan and an Oracle DBA. Although he readily admits to both of these facts, I still respect his point of view.
I often find that people can have their "blinkers on" when they talk about a particular topic. For me the debate will often rage around Oracle versus SQL Server or another DBMS platform. I often think that the important thing is to understand that effectively it does not matter what DBMS platform is being used; at the end of the day, all DBMS platforms are designed to store and retrieve data. The difference between the platforms is that two different people are looking at different ways to solve the same problem. In other words, is the glass half full or half empty?
- Peter Ward