Re: Stored fields ordered left to right

"Joe "Nuke Me Xemu" Foster" <joe_at_bftsi0.UUCP> wrote in message news:1072636217.654919_at_news-1.nethere.net... <snip>
> Heh. If she thinks the relational tuple vs. ordered n-tuple difference
> is insurmountable, she ought to try getting a mathematician and a
> theoretical physicist to communicate. They use different definitions
> for so many of the same terms that they'd have to invent an entirely
> new language to talk about much of anything besides last night's game!
>
> --
> Joe Foster <mailto:jlfoster%40znet.com> Sacrament R2-45
<http://www.xenu.net/>
> WARNING: I cannot be held responsible for the above They're
coming to
> because my cats have apparently learned to type. take me away,
ha ha!
>

Nope -- nothing insurmountable about it. It is a matter of language. I have been told that a particular model does not include relations because the tuples are ordered. I am also told that the relational model is based on mathematical relations. However, the model I'm trying to describe is based on mathematical relations and is not, by my calculations, at all based on the relational model as understood by Codd and company.

So, I need some new language in order to communicate this. This has nothing to do with insurmountable differences, but I am hopeful someone can help me come up with a way to state this that is fair to both models (doesn't make the Nelson-Pick model sound holier just because it is based on mathematical relations, nor the Codd model sound better because it is based on a definiton of relations that it created which has become the database industry standard language). Are you able to understand the question I'm raising?

Once I understood why relational theorists think that mathematical relations are not relations, I was able to narrow this down to an issue of vocabulary. Would it sit OK with relational theorists if I refer to their def of relation as "unordered relations" or "Codd relations"? I don't want to call them database relations because I'll be talking about databases that are using mathematical (ordered) tuples as well. I'm sure I can make something up,. but I don't want the language to obscure the information.

--dawn Received on Sun Dec 28 2003 - 20:06:56 CET