Re: foundations of relational theory? - some references for the truly starving

Costin Cozianu <c_cozianu_at_hotmail.com> wrote:
>You could compensate if you wanted by a careful thought out scientific
>work to prove exactly what your model buys the user.

Not to disagree with you Costin, most of your arguments seem to be on the mark. People seem to be butting heads on the theoretical merits of Pick compared to Relational. Scientific work be damned, it's fast and easy to create and maintain a Pick-based business application and database. You don't need DBA's or MBA's in a Pick shop because it's dirt simple to keep the system running with minimal information (and yes, there is admittedly minimal information available about this system).

There are many anecdotes about sites who have tried to migrate to relational environments away from their old Pick systems, spending millions (no exaggeration) of dollars on good systems and top notch people, only to find that they simply could not duplicate or improve upon the existing functionality even after a couple years of development. Sure we pat ourselves on the back and bask in the limelight of such failures, forgetting for a moment that most of the world seems to function just fine without such problems. But when we talk about "what the model will buy the user" we need to consider the bottom line: people spend money on technology as a means of making more money. Well, our technologies yield a major ROI with a minimal TCO, regardless of whether the model is defective in the minds of theorists. The IT industry prides itself as a growth-oriented industry but that growth rides on the backs of businesses with basic needs like processing their data. Come now, why are you using a relational database? Surely not because it's a superior model, but because that's where the bucks are, and the bucks are there because it's "the standard". Pick people pride themselves on providing good software to run businesses at a low cost. That very advantage is unfortunately what's doomed this industry - no bucks means no new blood. Once again Darwin shows us that natural selection has nothing to do with being the best at anything but spreading one's seed.

> Actually, the work
>was kind of done for you, theorists have analyzed the model and reached
>the logical conclusion that there's not much to it. Even more, the model
>is already available one way or the other in existing SQL DBMSes, but
>typically I don't use it and most people don't use it, for very
>practical reasons.

Ibid.

>You can't blame the "theorists" when you have very practical and serious
>problems, like for example your clients investing in an obsoleted
>technology with problematic future.

Obsoleted by whom? Why problematic? I agree that this industry probably has a life of (going on an optomistic limb) 20 years, which gives most people here some time to retire. But the issues have nothing to do with theory or science and everything to do with lack of marketing on the part of Pick people and simple ignorance on the part of people who assume relational is the only "real" model. "Welcome to Databases 101 where we will discuss the relational model and the SQL queries used to manipulate them." Yea, very scientific...

>And it is ridiculous for you guys to
>whine that theorists disregard your model, actually they don't, it's
>described in all theory books (now that I know it's actually about
>nested relations), they just are not so crazy about its virtues.

I can't find a single book in my small personal collection (including Celko, Date/Darwen, Rolland, Codd, Oracle, DB2, Sybase, SQL Server, mySQL, DB fundamentals, Intro to SQL, Databases books for Dummies, yada yada yada) that mentions the Pick model. Gosh, I can't even find a reference in books in bookstores. Not even a parenthetical reference in the historical notes about hierarchical and network models. And if theorists have any clue about the model why do most CDT people arguing in this thread keep coming up with invalid examples when comparing models? ("When in Rome", please...)

Tony Received on Wed Oct 22 2003 - 03:06:42 CEST