Re: Relational Databases and Their Guts

Paul,

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> Be warned though, there is a difference between RDBMS and Relational Databases.

What on earth do you mean by that?
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I think Todd's response was specific to the commercially available RDBMSs ( most likely the terminology mixup ), however, there is a difference between RDBMS & relational databases.

One can start with the difference between a database and a database management system. A database is a collection of axioms; in other words it is a set of known or true (believed to be true) facts that are properly represented for machine processing. A database management system (DBMS) is a comprehensive computer system which manages databases using its hardware and software resources.

I am sure you know all this; a relational DBMS (RDBMS), by definition, is a DBMS that represents all persistent data in a database as explicit values in relations and relations only. And obviously, such a database is termed as a relational database.

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- Anith
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