Re: Domains as relations

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