>> That was the point I was attempting to make. Over time a "slowly-progressing" wiki discussion, may take take 3 or 4 weeks to accumulate the info found in 100 messages here. That's what I meant by "think slowly".

Sorry David, I still don't get it. Maybe it's not important. Here goes anyway.

In a wiki, all any topic needs is someone knowledgeable to go in and lay it out. If JVP were to take just 5-minutes and lay out a well-thought bullet list of pros and cons, we're essentially done save correcting typos, rounding out the list, and pecking the finer points.

Thus it seems that on issues of technical fact, concensus seems to happen very quiclky on a wiki. I can't think of a single pure-technical topic on the fox wiki (offhand) that has evolved as slowly as you describe. The topics that seems to evoilve slowly (if at all) are the "fuzzy area topics", things like 'should I buy of build a framework'. That's fuzzy and in that case yes, you are absolutely right.

But "Stored Procs vs Remote Views"? That's a slam dunk because pros are pros and cons are cons (not much doubt about any of them, really) and the only thing left is to measure the balance, which is always going to be an individual, situation-specific, preference-driven and constraint-laden choice. That's the nature of design.

I guess I'm saying that MAYBE a 100-message thread is not necessarily a good sign. Maybe it's a sign that an inefficient medium is being used to hash this particular thing. It may also be true that a topic that spawns a 100-message thread does not automatically mean it's going to be a "slow-thinking" wiki topic.

Besides, reading 100 messages and summarizing it yourself, just for yourself, is laborious and unbelievably inefficient. Everybody has to do it. In something like a wiki, it's all there, and in the case of some future "SP vs RV" topic, a lurker could scan it all in a few seconds. Knowing the page exists, you can get to it anytime in the future, possibly in less time than it takes to log into a treaded site like this or FoxForum or Compuserve, nevermind search and hunt for the correct freaking thread that you must then re-live and hope that it contains all the pros and cons you need to make a decision whether to go with Remote Views or SQL Pass through in your particular situation... god, what a freaking waste.

(yawn!)

Andre