The comment that started this discussion was here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1829481 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1829481 in which it was sai

The comment that started this discussion was here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1829481 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1829481 in which it was said: > Yes, there are people out there who ... have never > heard of an inner join. We call them bad programmers. You said: > ... the definition of a database is an organised > collection of data. Ephemeral or transient data is > still data. That's not the point. Your sense of "a database" being "an organised collection of data" is actually more commonly (in my experience) referred to as "a data structure." Usually it's not "a database" until it gets some sort of query language or manipulation primitives. Yes, people refer to a collection of data as "a database," but I return to my original objection to the original comment requiring that not being a bad programmer requires that you know about inner-joins. As I said earlier, we have, to some extent, been talking past each other.