Re: First Impressions on Using Alphora's Dataphor

lajos.nagy_at_gmail.com (Josh Hewitt) wrote in message news:<1c92edeb.0408260910.60242a59_at_posting.google.com>...  [ snip ]
> What if major vendors 'do get it' but enterprise environments simply
> 'squeeze out' anything but atomic types (numbers, character strings,
> booleans, etc.) from the database?

 [ snip ]

  The dumbest idea in 'database theory' is that 'relational theory' is   about how to build 'databases' (and therefore that the way to advocate   for the 'relational model' is to bash SQL DBMS products, multi-value   DBMS products, and so on).

  The Relational Model describes a 'reason machine'.

  If you want the SQL:   

  UPDATE Emps E
    FROM GetSalaryPopupWindow G

     SET Salary := G.New_Salary 
   WHERE G.Name       = E.Name 
     AND G.Old_Salary = E.Salary
     AND G.UI_Device  = CurrentUserUI; 

   Emps E is a 'table'.

   GetSalaryPopupWindow is a 'relvar' that gets its values by popping up    a UI window populated with E.Name and current E.Salary into the device    indicated by the CurrentUserUI, and once that window is closed, yielding    a 'New_Salary' value back to the query.   

     Or

   UPDATE Screen S

     FROM File F
      SET S.Pixel = F.Pixel 
    WHERE S.X = F.X 
      AND S.Y = F.Y;

   There is *nothing* in the relational model that precludes doing this kind    of thing. There are inhibitors in the minds of relational thinkers, who    for too long have been fighting a battle they lost in their youth, over    and over and over again.

   Forget databases, guys. They're dead. Dead as the dodo.

   The kinds of things Dataphor is (ought to be) capable of are far broader,    and more important, than databases. Lord knows, Postgress could run    both of the queries above in 1993 (but all the relational people seemed to    notice was that it implemented references, and then used this    implementation to show that they had no performance advantage at all.) Received on Mon Aug 30 2004 - 20:32:26 CDT