C.J. Date seminar - October 19-20, 2005

• This notice is being posted with the list moderator's permission. **

Hotsos Enterprises, Ltd. is pleased to sponsor a two day seminar by C.J. Date in Grapevine, Texas on October 19-20, 2005 at the SpringHill Suites Hotel. C. J. Date is an independent author, lecturer, researcher, and consultant, specializing in relational database technology. He is best known for his book An Introduction to Database Systems (eighth edition, Addison-Wesley, 2004), which has sold some 725,000 copies and is used by several hundred colleges and universities worldwide. He is also the author of many other books on database management, including most recently:
>From Morgan Kaufmann: Temporal Data and the Relational Model (coauthored with Hugh Darwen and Nikos A. Lorentzos, 2003)
>From O'Reilly: Database in Depth: Relational Theory for Practitioners (2005)
>From Addison-Wesley: Databases, Types, and the Relational Model: The Third Manifesto (coauthored with Hugh Darwen, to appear)
Another book, Go Faster! The TransRelational Approach to DBMS Implementation, is also due for publication in the near future.

Mr. Date enjoys a reputation that is second to none for his ability to communicate complex technical subjects in a clear and understandable fashion.

The seminar is a combination of two presentations: Database in Depth: Relational Theory for Practitioners and Go Faster! The TransRelational Approach to DBMS Implementation.

Course Description

Day 1 - Database in Depth: Relational Theory for Practitioners

Years of experience in working with the database community strongly suggest a need for a seminar that covers relational principles in a way not tainted by the quirks and peculiarities of existing products, commercial practice, or the current version of the SQL standard. This seminar has been designed to meet that need. It's aimed primarily at database practitioners (that is, people working in the database field, perhaps on a daily basis) who feel they don't have as much understanding of the theory underlying their own field as they might. That theory is, of course, the relational model--and while the fundamental ideas of that model are all quite simple, they're widely misrepresented in the trade press and elsewhere; indeed, they're widely misunderstood, and often not understood at all.

Day 2 - Go Faster! The TransRelational Approach to DBMS Implementation

In the field of scientific endeavor, an idea emerges from time to time that is so startlingly novel, and so dramatically better than anything that went before, that it can truly be described as a breakthrough. The relational model provides the obvious example in the database world; almost everything done in that world since the relational model came along stands as testament to the radical nature and impact of that one brilliant idea. And now we are witnessing the birth of what looks set to be another major breakthrough: The TransRelational Model. In this speaker's opinion, the TransRelational model is likely to prove the most significant advance in this field since Codd gave us the relational model, over 35 years ago.

So what is the TransRelational model? In essence, it is an implementation technology; it represents among other things a radically new and elegant approach to the question of implementing the relational model. When the relational model first appeared, skeptics accused it of being impossible to implement efficiently. Over the next few decades, therefore, vast sums of money were spent on attempts to prove the skeptics wrong. And those efforts did not prove in vain; today's products do perform fairly well, if not always spectacularly. But at what cost? The products have become quite notoriously unwieldy and difficult to manage, with their huge array of storage structures, access methods, optimization techniques, tuning knobs, analysis utilities, performance hints, installation options, and so on, and the job of the database administrator has become virtually impossible.

The TransRelational model has the potential to change all that. It provides a totally new approach to implementation, one that is dramatically different from those that have been tried in the past and found wanting (including all of the approaches encountered in today's SQL products). Such an implementation would be orders of magnitude faster than, and would deliver a far greater degree of data independence than, today's SQL products. It would also greatly simplify the job of the DBA.

Each participant receives a copy of the course notes as well as Mr. Date's "Database in Depth" book. For more information on the seminar and registration information, please see http://www.hotsos.com/portal/education/DD201 or contact Stacy Wright at 817-488-6200 x505.

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