Re: why hierarchy?

From: Jay Dee <ais01479_at_aeneas.net>
Date: Wed, 26 Jul 2006 22:03:43 GMT
Message-ID: <3FRxg.58062$Eh1.56027_at_tornado.ohiordc.rr.com>


Neo wrote:

>>>I spoke in a recent thread of my distaste for XML from a theoretical standpoint ... I find this return of focus to hierarchical models since 1995 extremely frustrating.
>>
>>Addressing the idiocy above, the complexity and richness of the data are inherent to the data remaining with it no matter the representation. Increasing the complexity of the representing structures only increases complexity without adding any 'richness' at all. 'Richness' comes from the available operations for manipulating data represented in those structures, which are greatly reduced as the structural complexity increases.

>
>
> Could someone demonstrate the advantages of XML or RM at representing
> the simple example shown at www.dbfordummies.com/example/ex007.asp
> This example represents John and Mary in two hierarchies (without
> redundancy). In the first hierarchy, John and Mary are children of Adam
> and Eve who are children of God. In the second hierarchy, John and Mary
> are part of Mars and Venus respectively which are part of the Universe.

Again with the "Could someone.." requests?

Neo, as far as I can tell, no one understands what simple example the web page depicts. There are some universe and god and child dir and clsdir and part and john and mary and adam and eve words mixed with some gui artifacts -- but nowhere a prose description of wtf all that is supposed to represent.

If, as I gather from your post, there are simply two hierarchies and a pair of nodes are nodes in each, I don't see any difficulty at all in representing these in either a fully normal design or XML -- with no more redundancy than I see in your example.

I think you need to do a better job of explaining the tacit requirements in phrases like "multiple hierarchies" and "food judging" that are, apparently, obvious to you but unknown to the rest of us.

> To verify which method's underlying data model is more general, one can
> observe the impact on existing schema/data/query when meeting future
> unknown data requirements (to be proposed by someone else). Would
> someone be willing to engage in this trivial example?
>
Received on Thu Jul 27 2006 - 00:03:43 CEST

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