Re: Dreaming About Redesigning SQL

In article <ba87a3cf.0310031759.42dce77c_at_posting.google.com>, Seun Osewa <seunosewa_at_inaira.com> writes
>Thanks for the links.
>
>Christopher Browne <cbbrowne_at_acm.org> wrote in message news:<blkq9n$d9puv$4_at_ID-
>125932.news.uni-berlin.de>...
>> There are two notable 'projects' out there:
>>
>> 1. There's Darwen and Date's "Tutorial D" language, defined as part
>> of their "Third Manifesto" about relational databases.
>>
>> 2. newSQL <http://newsql.sourceforge.net/>, where they are studying
>> two syntaxes, one based on Java, and one based on a
>> simplification (to my mind, oversimplification) of SQL.
>
>I was able to get a pdf coy of the "Third Manifesto" article here:
>http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/darwen95third.html
>but the details of tutorial D seem not to be a part of that article.
>NewSQL *might* be cool if someone found reason to use it in a DBMS.

Is Darwen and Date's stuff that where they said SQL was crap. As I understand it, within about a year of designing SQL, at least one of Codd and Date said it was rubbish and tried to replace it with something "better".
>
>Sometimes I wonder why its so important to model data in the "rela-
>tional way", to think of data in form of sets of tuples rather than
>tables or lists or whatever. I mean, though its elegant and based
>on mathematical principles I would like to know why its the _right_
>model to follow in designing a DBMS (or database). The way my mind
>sees it, should we not rather be interested in what works?
>
I couldn't agree more (of course I would). As I like to put it, surely Occam's Razor says that stuffing the four-dimensional world into a flatearth  database can't be the optimal solution!

The trouble with so many SQL advocates is that they are so convinced in the mathematical rightness of the relational model, that they forget it is a *model* and, as such, needs to be shown as relevant to the real world.

That said, I always think relationally when designing databases - it helps. Look at the multi-value databases. Think relationally, you can still store your data in normal form, but you're not stuffed by all the irrelevant restrictions that relational databases tend to impose.

Get a freebie copy of jBASE, UniVerse or UniData, and try them out :-)

Cheers,
Wol

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