Re: Pizza Example

"Anthony W. Youngman" <wol_at_thewolery.demon.co.uk> wrote in message news:j4m$VcBg5zcAFwMZ_at_thewolery.demon.co.uk...
> The problem I see with relational, is that it does not cope with -
> indeed, denies the existence of - emergent complexity.

I'll address the specific example below, but what does this mean in general?

> For example,
> there is no way for the DBMS to know (or record the fact) whether a
> table represents a "noun" or a "repeating adjective".

What difference does it make?

> Seeing as nouns
> and adjectives are fundamentally different in language, I would have
> thought the inability of a DBMS to distinguish between the data
> equivalents would be a serious handicap...

The DBMS also can't distinguish past tense from present perfect tense. So what? What does the "data equivalent" mean?

Your argument seems to be that because the relational data model doesn't mirror language in its fundamental structures, that it's "fundamentally unable" to distinguish between several different things that need to be distinguished. Assuming that one could model the vagaries of human language (which might be doubtful), I don't see why relational would do a worse job than other data models. How does MV do so? Received on Wed Apr 07 2004 - 13:27:09 CEST