Re: QUESTION: List array, graph or network model support DB

Costin Cozianu wrote:
> David Cressey wrote:
>>> if you mean by "ideal" that it runs on Unix and crashes all the
>>> time and needs a bazillion DBA's to keep them running and you want
>>> to constantly recover your database and your data files, then you
>>> can have ideal.
>>
>>
>> A little background on my original comment might be in order. I
>> don't tend to use the term "ideal" myself, much.
>>
>> I was referring to a comment made fairly frequently in this forum,
>> to the effect that "A commercial Relational Databse system has never
>> been built." These people exclude Oracle, SQL Server, DB2, Informix,
>> Interbase, yada yada, because all of them fail, in one way or
>> another to live up to the "ideal" of a truly relational system. I
>> have a hard time with such terminological rigidity, myself. One
>> can say that all those products aren't perfect relational products,
>> but one shouldn't, in my view, say that they "aren't even
>> relational".
>
>
> Why do you think that they are "relational" ? Do they operate on
> relations ? I don't think so. If their primary business is not to
> operate on relations but on bags of rows, calling them relational is
> misleading.
>
> Just like ODBMS are often database construction kits or persistence
> libraries, SQL DBMSes are a real DBMS (they do provide transactions,
> recovery, concurrency control, some data integrity) + a *relational
> construction kit*. Meaning that by a skillful use of SQL one can come
> somewhere close to a relational database.
>
> But the complexity is left on the user to shoulder, and it is very
> difficult to stretch SQL so that you are still in the realm of
> relational model. And guess what: most users don't and most users
> suffer as a consequence.
>
> It's even worse than that : very often product documentation and books
> sponsored by the vendors (Oracle press: anyone there ?) simply lie to
> the users by defining relational model in the most ridiculous terms.
> Actually they screwed up their products, they built a multi-billion
> dollars industry by taking agressive shortcuts on the implementation
> side and transfering the complexity to the user and now they try to
> lie and cheat by proclaiming their version of "relational" (not long
> ago the auto industry maintained seat belts and airbags were
> unnecessarily expensive and not needed).
>
> Best regards,
> Costin Cozianu

Costin,

You might do well to read the OracleRdb manual set. It can be found on the Oracle documentation website. Start here http://www.oracle.com/rdb/

After you have read the several thousand pages here, you will may want to understand the internals. For this you need to go to training classes.

Then you may be qualified to *attempt* to describe exactly where this product deviates from the "relational model". You will of course need to find out exactly which *version* of the model you mean.

You will find that this product far exceeds all others in "relational" compliance. On top of that it is probably the highest performance engine on the market and has bells and whistles management and deployment features which put it at the top of the database food-chain.

If you have a beef with SQL (and I think it has serious problems as well), then take it up with the SQL standards committee. While SQL has its faults, it is fundamentally "relationlal" and you comment about "stretching SQL" to be relational makes no sense. Clearly you have been using toy databases all your life and need a change of scenery to more sophisticated implementations. (See reference above)

Actually, your problem is the one shared by many - the inability to distinguish between implementation and theory. Just beacuse some SQL implementations are poorly implemented (toy databases), does not mean that all of them are. Just beacuse some "relational databases" are not really realational, does not mean that they all aren't.

Finally, if you really want to see databases debunked by the experts (you could learn something here), go to http://www.dbdebunk.com/ where the Chris & Fabian do sterling work. Sadly however, they have not seen OracleRdb in the last 15 years either I suspect.

Dr. Dweeb Received on Mon Dec 16 2002 - 11:16:03 CET