Re: Network databases

Alfredo Novoa wrote:
> 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.

the argument from the 70s was that the original relational database used
indexes to effectively automate some amount of system administrative overhead (associated with physical pointers) at cost in disk space, real memory space, and processing time (trading off computer & processing resource against people time) ... this was somewhat independent of information organizational issue ... but physical implementation.

the original relational database work was somewhat targeted at bank accounts ... single table, bank account number is primary index, and rest of information was associated with bank account number. there was a very good match between the information organization and use with relational row/column organization.

there are other types of information where relatively trivial normalization can result in several hundred tables and there is little difference in the query complexity facing a user with respect to complex joins vis-a-vis network navigation (very low information uniformity, very large information uniqueness). Received on Wed Jan 12 2005 - 10:42:44 CST