Re: 4 the Faq: Strengths and Weaknesses of Data Models

"Laconic2" <laconic2_at_comcast.net> wrote in message news:3Z6dnbE4VanFIPLcRVn-pw_at_comcast.com...
>
> Well, for starters, their terminology was a strange mix of relational
> jargon, and traditional files and records jargon.
> In versions one and two of the product, they referred to "relations,
> records, fields, and global fields", instead of "tables, rows, columns, and
> domains".

I think this sort of thing doesn't matter as much as, say, Date thinks it does, one way or the other.

> They added support for SQL in version 3. I think they wanted to compete
> with IBM. Just using SQL as an interface is enough to earn the wrath of the
> relational bigots around here.
>
> It was possible to define a "relation" that would violate 1NF.

Argh! You're going to drop something like that and just leave it with no details?! Please be specific. You might have noticed 1NF gets debated here every once in a while. :-) Tell us more.

> They had a datatype called "DBKEY". This was really a pointer. This meant
> that you could build your own network or hierarchical database underneath
> the relational database if you wanted to. DBKEYs stored in records suffer
> from all the problems with the graph data model that are outlined in the
> theory. But they were blazingly fast!

Hrgmmmph.

> Their DML was really not a PL. In order to do "real programming", you
> needed a "real programming language".

I guess that's the same choice SQL makes. Every query halts, but you can't express everything you might like to.

I'm interested in more details if you have them.

Marshall Received on Fri Oct 15 2004 - 17:17:54 CEST