Re: Order & meaning in a proposition

In message <fg4670p1a2di7ht8ts5v571o7ca5c6dgkg_at_4ax.com>, Lemming <thiswillbounce_at_bumblbee.demon.co.uk> writes
>>> Not being familiar with PICK (although I do remember hearing about it
>>> all those years ago) I have to ask how a PICK database is structured,
>>> and what advantages that structure has over a relational structure.
>>
>>From a data modeling perspective, you can think of PICK as XML documents
>>(but with exceptional performance). Cheers! --dawn
>
>Yes, but that's not what I asked. I asked what is the advantage of
>the structure of a PICK database over a that of a relational database?
>Given that I think of XML documents as glorified web pages, saying
>that PICK is just XML with go-faster stripes isn't really going to
>convince me to make the switch :)

If you design your Pick data properly (ie the data in each FILE is normalised), rather than storing your data in 2-dimensional tables where you need a complex view to reassemble a single real-world object, Pick will store the equivalent of your view in a single FILE with each object instance stored as a single RECORD or "row".

It's far easier to understand - one database "object" maps to one real-world "object", and given that you are statistically far more likely to want to access an object-view than a table, Pick in practice is exceedingly fast. You don't need to reassemble the data describing an object, because Pick stores it all together in the first place - but if you want a normalised view it's all there - oh and you don't get that artifact of views, where a 1-many join causes a single piece of data to appear many times in multiple rows...

Cheers,
Wol

-- 
Anthony W. Youngman - wol at thewolery dot demon dot co dot uk
HEX wondered how much he should tell the Wizards. He felt it would not be a
good idea to burden them with too much input. Hex always thought of his reports
as Lies-to-People.
The Science of Discworld : (c) Terry Pratchett 1999