Re: 4 the FAQ: Are Commercial DBMS Truly Relational?

From: Christopher Browne <cbbrowne_at_acm.org>
Date: 11 Oct 2004 01:45:59 GMT
Message-ID: <2su6unF1o9kd1U1_at_uni-berlin.de>


Clinging to sanity, Andrew McDonagh <news_at_andrewcdonagh.f2s.com> mumbled into her beard:
> Laconic2 wrote:
>> "Paul" <paul_at_test.com> wrote in message
>> news:41690aad$0$59441$ed2619ec_at_ptn-nntp-reader03.plus.net...
> Snipped
>
>> There is a widespread belief in this field that wrong answers with
>> good performance are closer to the goal line than correct answers
>> with poor performance. I will never come around to that point of
>> view. I almost always want to get it right, first, then work on
>> getting it right, and fast.
>
> I agree, its usually a case of 'premature optimisation'... i.e. they
> use these 'tricks' for optimisation thinking that will create
> performance benefits, but usually the real bottle necks are else
> where within the system. Therefore applying these tricks only serve
> to complicate the matter.

The notion of "wrong answers with good performance" can also fit with the notion of using approximations.

There are cases where modelling the exact correct result is costly, and that an approximation will suffice at lower cost.

There are numerous sorts of costs:

An approximate answer that takes an hour to find that is "close enough" that allows timely decision making is better than one that is exact but that took too long to find so that the information arrived too late for use.

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Received on Mon Oct 11 2004 - 03:45:59 CEST

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