Re: THe OverRelational Manifesto (ORM)

U-gene wrote:

> "… the “The Third Manifesto” is formal and logical. However, The
> OverRelational Manifesto (ORM) cannot unconditionally accept the claims
> of the “The Third Manifesto”, because, in our opinion, the
> premises, which are its basis, are incomplete. Recall that, answering
> the first question “What concept in the relational world is the
> counterpart to the concept "object class" in the object world?”, the
> “The Third Manifesto” considers the two possible versions
> 1. domain = object class
> 2. relation = object class
> "The Third Manifestо" argues strongly that the first of these
> equations is right and the second is wrong (ORM agrees with this) and,
> further, its arguments are based just on the first version.
>
> Note that ORM does not claim that the propositions of the “The Third
> Manifesto” are erroneous. However, ORM does not doubt that these two
> answers (even the right one) to the question in the preceding paragraph
> are not only answers to the question about the possible relationship
> between the “object world” and the “relational world.” There is
> another approach that can be described by none of the answers proposed
> in the “The Third Manifesto”.
>
> …
>
> ORM assume that the value describing the state of any entity is a set
> of relations (or, more definitely, relation values), which is a subset
> of the relational database describing the state of the whole
> enterprise.
>
> ORM claims that a system that allows to specify explicitly and to
> manipulate such subsets is the required system that possesses the
> properties of both object and relational systems. Accordingly, the main
> requirement of ORM is the following:
>
> The value describing the state of an entity of an enterprise must be
> represented as a set of relation values.
>
> Any system satisfying the main requirement will be referred to as an
> R*O-system.
>
> Remark. Therefore, to relate the “object world” and the
> “relational world”, ORM associates object with a set of relations.
> Note that the concept of database appearing in RMD is also defined as a
> set of relation. Essentially, ORM regards the database as a collection
> of subsets (not necessarily disjoint, even embeddings are possible); by
> definition, each subset may also be considered the database.
>
> …
>
> The type system necessary for description and manipulation of data,
> constraints on the data integrity, and a set of operations are
> described. It is shown that complex structure definition, in which
> these types are used, can be treated as definition of set of relational
> variables (R-variables). The common rule for definition and naming of
> possible R-variables is formulated, which asserts that the definition
> of complex reference structure, in which path expression
> "name1.*.*.nameZ" is correct (where "*" is any, possible empty
> sequense of names), can be interpreted as definition of a relation
> variable named as "name1.*" , in which the scalar attribute named as
> "*.nameZ" exists…"
>
> You can find full version (preprint, PDF, 37 pages) on
> www.TheORM.narod.ru or on http://www.arxiv.org/abs/cs.DB/0602052
>
> Dear ALL. I'm very interesting for your opinion on the ORM. You can
> leave you messages here, or on www.TheORM.narod.ru, or by e-mail
> grigoriev-e_at_yandex.ru.
>

It sounds pretty stupid and rather useless to me. Exactly what problem does it address that is not already addressed at least as well? Received on Thu Apr 06 2006 - 03:05:18 CEST