The database is not my friend. Friends do not refuse to let you install them, only to finally give in and then end up installed in the wrong directory, causing you to have to be late to lunch due to uninstalling and then reinstalling them. And even if a friend did do such a thing, said friend would not then cause a machine to slow to a crawl, so that you spent a long slow period trying to figure out which processes were making things so slow to kill them, only to discover that it was really the database all along. And let's not even get into how the database treats the schema-building scripts -- cruelly, coldly, snubbing them despite the hours of work I'd put into making sure they were perfectly suited to the needs of the moment. A friend would be nicer about it, more polite. A friend would take the script, say it was the best thing it'd ever seen and aren't those adorable little foreign key constraints?, and then quietly stick it in the back of a closet and only pull it out once a year, maybe to wear to your birthday party. This is how I know the database is not my friend.

Then again, perhaps I have an idealised view of friendship.

Which may mean that Microsoft Windows is a fantasy, given all the InstallWizards and SetupWizards and ConfigurationWizards one can find there. So perhaps the databse will become a kind-hearted true friend. Who can say?