SQL Standards. And standards.

Who comes up with this shit? Seriously? Is it human nature to try to make everything your own, or a flawed side effect of our culture? (In that case it's royalties). I'm talking standards, of course! Why can't we all just get along? Consider SQL. We like SQL! It's simple, powerful, and has proven to be conducive to interoperability. Don't believe me? Check out all the database frontends that work with so many "flavors" of SQL. There are innumerable database driven applications that could run on any. Why is it so hard to get along? We've got ANSI and ISO SQL (think 7 layer OSI reference model - let's implement that...right...?). Microsoft's gotta be different from Oracle, and MySQL, and IBM DB2, and PostgreSQL - and they're all subtle-ly (is that a word?) different from each other! Cumon M$, why do you have to use the TOP keyword instead of LIMIT to limit returned record sets? You know your programmers could efficiently implement both? Can't just pick on Microsoft, though - they all do it! Going to a unified, or standardized language set, while maintaining backward compatibility, really shouldn't be that big an issue. Everyone's products will be the better for it.

Let me tell you about designating quality codes for object overlays when designing SQLTags in FactoryPMI. We could have chosen whatever quality codes we wanted. My birthday could have been a tragic error! But we chose to follow OPC convention. Why? Standardization. I have no idea why 192 is the quality code for good data. But someone smarter than me said it would be. And so it went...

I was prepping myself for a long rant about standards - I was going to tear Sony a new one. But I'm tired. I'd rather go to sleep.