Re: Mapping arbitrary number of attributes to DB

"Sampo Syreeni" <decoy_at_iki.fi> wrote in message news:Pine.SOL.4.62.0610251416270.23598_at_kruuna.helsinki.fi...
> The best thing would be if the DBMS had full support for this sort of
> thing -- e.g. you could import blobs of data, a partial structuring schema
> could be imposed on them at the physical level, suddenly the part of the
> data that was declared would become visible as first class relations, and
> the rest of it would remain accessible as binary or some semistructured
> representation like EAV so that it could still be passed on as-is, maybe
> revealed on the logical level later on, and in any case maintained under
> the strong ACID guarantees that only DBMS's provide -- but as long as it
> doesn't and you need to be able to abstract away from the structure of
> some piece of data, circumventing the relational typing machinery can be
> the least bad alternative.

To repeat what I already said in this thread, even the crappiest so-called SQL DBMSs on the market already solve the problem extremely well for practical purposes. We aren't going to move one inch further forward until we acknowledge where the problem really is now, and it sure ain't in the one part that's already solved it.

This is an application development problem. Let's look at what needs to change there instead of trashing the one success we can already point to. That would be a far more interesting conversation than rehashing "the abomination that dare not speak its name" (in various forms) yet again.

Roy Received on Wed Oct 25 2006 - 14:45:03 CEST