Re: Nearest Common Ancestor Report (XDb1's $1000 Challenge)

> Would either or both of you consider an arbitrator? ::grin::

I could, if ...

1. "Any hierarchy" means if XDb1 can generate a report for it, then RM's should also. "Any hierarchy" includes the class/type hierarchy.
2. "Normalized" means either eliminating or replacing redundant things (data/schema) within the db with an appropriate non-data dependent reference/link (IDs in RM) to the one and only original. And yes I consider db schema to be data. And yes I consider symbols to be data.
3. "Report from normalized ... data" means the report is not to be generated from intermediate results or statistics based on prior runs.
4. "Solution must be as generic" means among other things that if XDb1 can handle a particular hierarchy or print a thing's classes and attributes on the report, so should the comparable solution.
5. An iterative process to reach a fair comparison.

Other suggestions:
6. The "2X slower" was a conservative figure to account for extra processing time for multi-user, security, and recovery overhead of dbs such as SQL Server; on the other hand XDb1 has the overhead of variable data structures. The "2X" should be adjusted appropriately for the situation of generating a report from normalized data. 7. Remove the variability of disk I/O by making measurements for activity in RAM only.
8. Last place pays winner :)
Would anybody from Oracle, IBM or FirstSQL like to join?

From the original post:
"$1000 to the first person who replicates the equivalent of www.xdb1.com/Example/Ex076.asp using the relational model. To claim the prize, one needs to produce the equivalent Nearest Common Ancestor Report from normalized and NULL-less data and the solution must be as generic, meaning allow the user to create any hierarchy, consisting of different types of things (each type to allow different attributes) and each thing in the hierarchy to have any number of parents. Report generation must not be more than 2X slower than XDb1 on equivalent hardware." Received on Sat Jun 05 2004 - 14:18:43 CDT