Re: "Transactions are bad, real bad" - discuss

"Costin Cozianu" <c_cozianu_at_hotmail.com> wrote in message news:b9e38p$i9a88$1_at_ID-152540.news.dfncis.de...
> Paul Vernon wrote:
> > "Pablo Sanchez" <pablo_at_dev.null> wrote in message
> > news:Xns9373EB0EF7592pingottpingottbah_at_216.166.71.233...
> > [snip]
> >
> >>My school of thought is that a DBMS shouldn't be the end-all
> >>solution.
> >
> >
> > I would be genuinely interested in knowing why you think that. Do you have
any
> > deep reasons? Maybe you just want to protect the job creation scheme that
is
> > the role of 'Applications Programmer' ????
> >
>
> I'll give you another reason: intractability. Some problems are
> unsolvable in the database, or at least in the database as we understand
> databases now.
>
>
> Unless you want the database language to have the full programming power
> *and* expressivity as a full blown language - say LISP, and massage the
> whole echillada in the DBMS, which would be truely horrible.

You make a good point Costin. My take is that we do want full expressive power in the DMBS, but that we also want to restrict that power and not make it available to untrusted users.

What I'm thinking is that the language available on a DBMS is a nesting of subsequently more expressive languages.

So there might be a basic relational core - without generalised transitive closure - that could safely be used by even malicious database users. From there, the more trusted you are, the more powerful syntax you are allowed -all the way up to full expressivity of say some functional language.

I'm not sure how such a language would look, and I guess that logically it would actually be multiple languages and if only the relational subset was seen as the "DBMS language", then maybe I have agreed with your point, we don't necessarily want full expressivity in the core relational model...

Regards
Paul Vernon
Business Intelligence, IBM Global Services Received on Fri May 09 2003 - 12:30:58 CEST