Re: foundations of relational theory?

"Marshall Spight" <mspight_at_dnai.com> wrote in message news:<ww_nb.59317$Tr4.141427_at_attbi_s03>...
> "Anthony W. Youngman" <thewolery_at_nospam.demon.co.uk> wrote in message news:VnHGwdHq$Fo$Ew0I_at_thewolery.demon.co.uk...
> >
> > You saw my stats and reference to "1.05"? Given a request by the app,
> > this is the number of times a MV database has to look (on average) to
> > find the data the app requested.
>
> If I understand your 1.05 correctly, then I don't think you are
> correct in thinking that 1.0 represents the theoretical minimum.
> By way of comparison, I once took over an ODBC driver codebase,
> and I was concerned about efficiency. One metric I used was
> remote procedure calls per odbc call. On the surface, it seems
> like the limit will be 1. When I took the project over, the number
> was about 1.5. When I finished some months later, the number
> was 0.2.
>
>
> > The relational theory way of saying "we won't specify the implementation
> > because we may find new ways of speeding it up" comes across as daft to
> > the MV people who say "we can't make that figure less than one, and
> > we're so close what's the point of trying to speed it up?"
>
> Given your assumptions, that makes sense, but I think your
> assumptions are invalid.

To the daft, everything comes across as daft. You have to keep in mind who you are talking to. Received on Thu Oct 30 2003 - 14:47:00 CET