Data independence

From: x <x-false_at_yahoo.com>
Date: Tue, 11 May 2004 19:07:18 +0300
Message-ID: <40a0f96d$1_at_post.usenet.com>


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Codd 1970 ACM paper:



In contrast, the problems treated here are those of data independence--the independence of application programs and terminal activities from:
  • growth in data types
  • changes in data representation
  • certain kinds of data inconsistency which are expected to become troublesome even in nondeductive systems

Then he discuss the following dependencies:
- Ordering Dependence

  • Indexing Dependence
  • Access Path Dependence and then he propose the relational model for dealing with these dependencies.

Taking into consideration that:
1) the access path to an item of data in a RDBMS "would take a form such as R (g).r.d"
2) when someone write R1=R2 (where R1 and R2 are relationships) , he/she usually mean "=" for all time
3) if someone change the key constraints of a relationship, actually he/she define a new relationship
4) to access an "item of data" in a RDBMS, in addition to relationship name and attribute name, one would need the value of some key how the relational model solve the "Access Path Dependence" problem ?

In other words: It is possible to write applications that are independent of the change of key contraints in a RDBMS ? How ?

Citation ; Codd 1970 ACM Paper:
In previous work there has been a strong tendency to treat the data in a data bank as consisting of two parts, one part consisting of entity descriptions (for example, descriptions  of suppliers) and the other part consisting of relations  between the various entities or types of entities (for example, the supply relation). This distinction is difficult to maintain when one may have foreign keys in any relation  whatsoever.

In the USERS's relational model there appears to be no advantage to making such a distinction.

If the answer is : "By introducing entity domains", how such an relational model would compare to an ER model ? (Someone claimed that ER-modeling is less powerful than R-modeling)

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Received on Tue May 11 2004 - 18:07:18 CEST

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