Re: Dreaming About Redesigning SQL

Hi,

seunosewa_at_inaira.com (Seun Osewa) wrote in message news:<ba87a3cf.0310062207.1d09cff6_at_posting.google.com>...
> One question that I think must be looked into is this: If SQL
> databases are successful today, is it because:
> ** of the relational _model_ they are based on?
>
> ** of the ease with which SQL can be used from within all programming
> languages and as an interactive query language?
>
> ** The failure or earlier models and the support of major SQL database
> vendors once it reached critical mass of adoption?
>
> In other words do we have the model, the language, or standardisation
> to blame/praise for the popularity of the relational model?

Quote from
http://www.mcjones.org/System_R/SQL_Reunion_95/sqlr95-Prehisto.html

"We knew sort of peripherally that there was some work going on in the provinces, in San Jose. There was this guy Ted Codd who had some kind of strange mathematical notation, but nobody took it very seriously. Ray Boyce was hired at about this time, and we kind of got into this game called the Query Game where we were thinking of ways to express complicated queries. But actually before the Query Game started, I had a conversion experience, and I still remember this. Ted Codd came to visit Yorktown, I think it might have been at this symposium that Irv alluded to. He gave a seminar and a lot of us went to listen to him. This was as I say a revelation for me because Codd had a bunch of queries that were fairly complicated queries and since I'd been studying CODASYL, I could imagine how those queries would have been represented in CODASYL by programs that were five pages long that would navigate through this labyrinth of pointers and stuff. Codd would sort of write them down as one-liners. These would be queries like, "Find the employees who earn more than their managers." [laughter] He just whacked them out and you could sort of read them, and they weren't complicated at all, and I said, "Wow." This was kind of a conversion experience for me, that I understood what the relational thing was about after that."

Seun Osewa. Received on Sun Oct 12 2003 - 12:58:55 CDT