Re: What databases have taught me

> Unstructured *anything* is going to be a bit difficult to use with any kind of automation.

The term "highly unstructured" was a poor choice. Everything has a structure. A neatly stacked deck of cards has structure. All of a bomb's particles x microseconds after an explosion have a structure. I think the term high variable structure may be better. In the example which models 10 computer systems, each has a significantly different structure. In such a case, RM begins to loses its advantages since the data doesn't fit neatly in a few tables. Whether the data structure is a list, tree, table, graph, network makes little difference to dbd as it uses a very general method to represent/query them. If someone would like model a few of the computer systems with an RMDB and run a few basic queries, I think they might see that dbd brings more discipline to highly variable relationships than RM does.

> However, I am not saying that relational is best for every structuring need; just the majority of what I encounter in my domain.

I agree that a more general method will typically be less efficient than a less general method that is optimized for a certian domain/scope. While RM is well suited for many common apps, it is not as suitable for say AI-type apps where data structures are not only highly variable but unknown in advance which makes a methodolgy where a schema has to be updated, less practical. Received on Sat Jun 24 2006 - 05:35:34 CEST