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

Tony Gravagno wrote:
> 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.

So is Microsoft Access and Fox Pro and Paradox. Who gives a damn about these ?

Without a scientific work describing what the features are, what are the   integrity consttraints, expressive power, is it relationally complete, is the language declarative, etc, etc, I'm sorry but I can only disregard your model as a matter of principle, just the same that we have to disregard anybody who claims that he has a perpetuum mobile, or he has a valid pyramidal scheme.

> 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.

There is a vast amount, approximately >80% in my estimation of people in the industry that are unqualified. if software engineering would have the same maturity with say practicing medicine, 80% of the people would have to be fired on the spot.

Including the guys who claim to be "top-notch".

So here it goes your acnedotal evidence out on the window from the first spot

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.

Sure. If PickDB offers me the same relational features as say, Oracle I'm ready to consider it for the next project. If all it offers is instead a development toolkit a la FoxPro, or no integrity constraints and limited declarative query , or problematic concurrency control, or doesn't have convenient or production ready language bindings for Java, C#, C++, Visual Basic, then forget about it, right away.

How can I judge these for myself ? I am not going to read it from marketing brochure, or am I ?

I am not going to download and setup ellaborate load tests, and learn the stupid damn thing, or am I ?

This attitude of "try and you'll be enlightened" is completely idiotic

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.
>

This is the most BS crap you can produce.

If it was that smart Pick Db can blow out at least TPC-W and TPC-H which are sufficiently technology neutral, at price performance comparison.

>

>>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 'c'est la vie' obsoletion algorithm. Obsoleted by the fact that novody seems to care about it anymore.

> 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.

The ignorance charge goes also the other way around.

You guys don't understand that there's nothing special in Pick/MV model that SQL DBMSes do not have. So yes, it is the only real model, as long as MV model is subsumed by the relational model.

  "Welcome to
> Databases 101 where we will discuss the relational model and the SQL
> queries used to manipulate them." Yea, very scientific...
>
>

Yes, it is.

>

>>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.

As somebody already mentioned it's the nested relation (aka NFNF) extension to the classical relational model. Yes, nobody mentions Pick, big deal, as nobody mentions Informix database model.

This is treated in some 14 pages in, Abiteboul, Hull and Vianu, Foundations of databases which is *the* reference on database theory, and in all introductory text books (like Date's Introduction to Database Systems, Bernstein Lewis and Kifer, and all others ).

The other books you mentioned are irrelevant.

Costin Received on Wed Oct 22 2003 - 04:54:11 CEST