Re: Network databases

On 11 Jan 2005 08:14:14 -0800, lynn_at_garlic.com wrote:

>wasn't so much about the information organization ... but about the
>physical implementation. the hierarchical/network implementations from
>the 50/60s used direct physical pointers ...

And logical pointers.

> while relational used
>indexes. The direct physical pointers increased human administrative
>workload ...

And the logical pointers increase the coders workload (and the cost) in orders of magnitude.

> but was faster for the standard case ... being able to go
>directly to the desired data. relational reduced the human
>administrative effort but increased the overhead to get to the desired
>data and typically doubled the physical storage requirements (both
>space and processing overhead introduced by the indexes).

The RDBMSs moved a lot of processing from the apps to the DBMS, and the global processing load was not necessarily increased, in fact with a good optimizer it migth be reduced.

>the physical pointer implementation vis-a-vis indexes can be
>independent of the information organization (aka it is possible to do
>physical implementation using indexes for both hierarchical and network
>information organizations).

And it is possible to do physical implementation using pointers with relational databases.

In a short: with relational databases we can get the same or better performance but working a lot less.

Regards Received on Wed Jan 12 2005 - 08:09:18 CST