Re: A better SQL implementation?

From: paul c <toledobythesea_at_oohay.ac>
Date: Fri, 09 Jun 2006 00:58:47 GMT
Message-ID: <bJ3ig.1117$L25.250_at_pd7tw3no>


David Cressey wrote:
> ...
> If I go back twenty years, I was dealing with Rdb/VMS. Rdb/VMS was most
> certainly capable of using more than one index to resolve a single query. I
> can't believe that someone who worked on the original system-R would fail to
> know both Rdb/VMS and, more importantly, the algorithms the strategy
> generator uses to propose alternatives.
> ...

Maybe I should have said thirty years. For sure in both eras, everybody and his brother worried about seek times and rotational latencies almost to the exclusion of everything else. Come to think of it I was aware of products (non-relational) that exploited all indexes before they went after "rows".

By the way, when I was talking about transactions in a low-level DEC access method (in some other thread here - you thought it might have been RMS) my memory was playing tricks on me. Credit where credit is due - the access method (whose name I still forget) was built in to WANG/VS, not a DEC offering. The transaction support (which was a requirement of the product I was using) was a walk in the park compared to drivers for other platforms, eg. VSAM, that I had to prototype.

p Received on Fri Jun 09 2006 - 02:58:47 CEST

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