Re: Lucid statement of the MV vs RM position?

Christopher Browne wrote:

If you look at the ACM TODS (Transactions on Database Systems), a goodly number of the papers present views of relational systems in a fashion that looks *way* more like Prolog than anything else. ***
There is a conspicuous disconnect from Darwen/Date, there, in that they trumpet loudly about strong data typing, whilst Prolog tends to be nearly type-free. Mind you, I'm conflating representation and model there, a bit...

Jay Dee wrote:

The "knowledge" DBMSs, which store facts and functional dependencies explicitly and independently, behave very differently than most "relational" DBMSs. I don't want to spend too much time on this point, but let me simply say that a KDBMS can be expected to expunge everything which is inconsistent with the most recently presented knowledge. Most DBMSs that posters to this group are familiar with would expect the system to reject such inconsistent data - usually because some constraint is violated.- rather than view it as better knowledge.

Bob Badour wrote:

So, one careless mistake can wipe out the entire database?!? Yikes!!!

Well, yes -- but it would be considered an education.

In other words, KDBs presume that tuples presented for storage are true; if something "new" (inconsistent) shows up all the "old" knowledge is expected to be discarded.

As I tried to point out: this is significantly different than the sorts of things Date and Darwin are working on and different languages "work better." Received on Sun Apr 23 2006 - 06:15:29 CEST