Re: object algebra

> and why not go down to the 1's & 0's

The issue is not which set of composite symbols are most "normalized" (five vs 5 vs 1001) when representing a thing, but that a composite symbol can be normalized. For example, the symbols in "1001" can be normalized to "->1, ->0, ->0, ->1".

>what does symbol "normalization" gain you?

Hypothethically, suppose, Microsoft says, inorder to include symbols from the neighboring galaxy we want to change a's ascii value from 97 to 1.56E03. In XDb1, this change would only occur at one place, all other a's will automatically be correct since they reference the original a.

Practically, normalizing symbols allows TDM/XDb1 to find things (by their name) within the database quickly no matter where they are located. In RDM, to implement a general solution to find a composite symbol (ie john), one would have to search every table, every row, every column and the algorithm needs to handle tables added in the future.

In TDM/XDb1, because symbols are normalized, the general solution does not require a scan of the entire db and the algorithm is unaffected by future "tables".

Would someone like to compare the time to find things by their composite symbols (ie john) using a general solution? By general, I mean, it is able to find john in any field of any table including tables not in existance during design-time. Received on Thu Mar 04 2004 - 23:52:58 CET