Re: OO fans bashing Joins

On Mon, 06 Mar 2000 06:02:41 GMT, topmind_at_technologist.com wrote:
>Is there some truth to this rumor, or is it just
>more annoying OO propoganda?

The later.

Maybe relational is a bit dogmatic about not storing pointers, which would not hurt anything as long as the full relational access was not comprimised (the pointers could be used only when appropriate, once upon a time there were such hybrid databases built and sold). Of course it costs more at update time, to update whatever in-pointers might exist, in order to increase performance at some expected future select times -- often a good bet.

RDBMS vendors and theorists have just decided, a priori, that the performance penalty of recalculating joins is acceptable, and is fully general, where non-relational pointer tangles would be fast at what they do, but not fully general unless they are laid on top of something equivalent to a relational, normalized system.

J. Received on Sun Mar 19 2000 - 00:00:00 CET