Re: Eh?
"And why did he throw away his original data? That one went right over my head - only a moron assumes that he has extracted every piece of information from original data."
I think that is the point that the author was actually making. This is made clear in the bit where he says:
"You can see where this is going. In selecting the functions I choose to run I have defined exactly the questions that I can ask of the data. If I later want to know the number of King Penguins in the image, tough; I can’t."
"If only I had thought ahead! If only I had stored the image file itself (in some non-tabular way), I could write and run my new function and count the King Penguins. But no, I was foolish; I believed those idiots who told me that the relational model allows any question to be asked of the data."
I think it is relatively important to read the entire article.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
