Re: The IDS, the EDS and the DBMS

Marshall Spight wrote:

> mAsterdam wrote:

>>Marshall Spight wrote:
>>>..."object-relational mapping." ...
>>>to provide you with an object-based interface
>>>to your relational data, which comes merely at 
>>>the cost of crippling the kinds of queries you can make.
>>
>>... Is it because bridging the impedance 
>>mismatch is not a worthwhile quest, is it
>>because it it impossible or just because
>>none of these projects has done a good
>>job at it yet?

This is, again, us vs. them of the my-model-is-better variant. This flows to a need to convert the OO-thinking people to the one true data religion, Tha Reletional Model.

Maybe you are right. Hard to tell when we need to conclude that somebody is wrong and somebody is right (we are, of course).

I prefer a situational approach:
First try: Where is OO used? Where is RM used? What are the assumptions, environmental requirements? Let's inspect how they - in fact - cooperate. Let's list what is the same, where the
differences are and where these differences become relevant. Let's forget, for now, the flags of the combattant groups: OO & RM. This is where the power of Laconics' IDS and EDS comes in (mapping wonderfully to Fowlers' integration/application database).

> Thus, any attempt
> to wrap relational in OO is *necessarily* going to have
> less expressive power than the unwrapped plain relational
> model.

You point out a loss going from RM to OO. Ok. No gains? At all?

> Although I am generally favorable towards D&D and TTM,
> I don't consider that they've gone far enough. They are absolutely
> correct in identifying the lame type systems of today's RDBMS
> products as being a significant hindrance, but their proposed
> language, while advanced in relational features, completely
> ignores everything else that's happened in the last 30 years
> in programming languages and type theory. It is like a variant
> of Fortran with highly developed relational features.

:-)

>>Trade offs are to be expected.

Let's find out.

> I myself am not
> big on compromise; I want it all. I want the full power
> of the relational model, along with important and/or
> modern language features such as type inference,
> parametric polymorphism, first-class functions, partial
> evaluation, etc.

Let's not find out, but eat our cake and have it. Received on Sun Sep 05 2004 - 13:09:02 CEST