The Gnucash database?

[Linas Vepstas]

Hi Mark,

Nice try, but I'll argue every point...

On Sat, Jul 24, 2004 at 10:33:18AM -0500, Mark H. Wood was heard to remark:
> I think I finally understand some of the confusion swirling around this
> thread.
> 
> Financial data certainly are flat.  

And so starts the confusion ... this is not true.

> They have been so for as far back as
> I'm aware of anyone keeping financial data.  A ledger is flat.  The

Not true.  The paper is flat, the data on it is not.

Don't confuse the messenger for the message.

> important part of a statement is flat.  

Not true. Each journal entry made refers to an account which is in 
a different (paper) book.  Each account refers to a client, whose
name, phone and address appear only on the cover of the book.  

To track down a purchase using a traditional pen-ink-paper accounting,
you might open 2,3,4 or more books, and flip across multiple pages.
To compute your net worth, you will finger through every folder 
in your file cabinet.  There is nothing "flat" about this.

> Financial *reports* are, to a machine, meaningless BLOBs.  When rendered
> on a viewing medium they are spatial arrangements of tables and formatted
> data from individual rows which are highly meaningful to humans, but
> useless for re-input to computers.  But you don't store reports in an
> accounting system; you synthesize them when asked.

Bing. The person who started this thread beasically stated

"I have this report, I want to import it into gnucash. Why is 
gnucash so stupid that it can't do this?"

> All this is representable in tables, 

Gnucash has several dozen tables; I haven't counted recently.

> before
> there were DBMSs.

DBMS's were invented to solve the accounting problem ... you see how far
we've come ... There are lots of DBMS's but the accounting problem
remains unsolved.

--linas

-- 
pub  1024D/01045933 2001-02-01 Linas Vepstas (Labas!) <linas at linas.org>
PGP Key fingerprint = 8305 2521 6000 0B5E 8984  3F54 64A9 9A82 0104 5933