Re: Domains as relations
Date: 8 Oct 2002 12:40:50 +0200
Message-ID: <3da2b632$1_at_news.uia.ac.be>
In article <51d64140.0210080104.f79cbee_at_posting.google.com>,
Paul <pbrazier_at_cosmos-uk.co.uk> wrote:
>
>I'm wondering how far you can go with eliminating every non-relational
>part of a DBMS?
As far as anything that can be described in first-order logic.
>I guess Godel would imply that a totally relational
>system would be "incomplete" in some sense - so at some point we'd
>have to accept that the relational model is in fact embedded within a
>larger "meta-model" which we'd have to use to answer some questions
>about the system.
That won't help. Goedels' incompleteness theorem says you cannot finitely axiomatize the natural numbers (or even do it with a recursively enumerable list of axioms) so building a bigger system cannot be a solution.
- Jan Hidders