organizing tables?

I've been thinking about the need for an organization principle for relational data. Imagine a dbms that supports many users and many applications. After a point, the idea that one has a flat namespace for databases within the dbms doesn't seem so nice anymore. What if there are hundreds of databases? What if you want to be able to import some of the tables from one database and some from another, etc., into your person database?

It seems like you need to have some organizing principle. I hate to say it, but the popular choice always seems to be a hierarchical namespace.

Anyone have any thoughts or are there any interesting prototypes out there? It seems like this idea was the 05/25/2003: Quote of the Week on dbdebunk.com. (Which is to say, I think they were making fun of the idea.)

Marshall Received on Mon Jul 14 2003 - 05:47:59 CEST