Re: Generalised approach to storing address details

On Dec 14, 9:41 am, Bob Badour <bbad..._at_pei.sympatico.ca> wrote:
> Marshall wrote:
>
> > I've never had to program a BOM application, and I've read about them
> > only a little. I'm not qualified to have an opinion on BOM
> > specifically.
> I have programmed BOM applications, and at the time I used a proprietary
> network model dbms. That experience largely influenced my opinion of the
> network model.
>
> BOM's are not hierarchies, BTW. The general BOM is a DAG.

Interesting.

I've never been exactly clear on what the term "network model" means; I've assumed it's quite comparable to an object graph, with which I am quite familiar. It is striking to me that a Turing complete OO language such as Java can have such a hard time with things that a non-Turing complete language such as SQL is so good at. And this even for simple, everyday tasks like filter-and-sum.

These days I "get" to use an in-house DBMS that is basically a hash table of hierarchies. Join is not supported. No joins means denormalization is the rule; various offline processes manage the maintenance of the denormalized data. I try not to let it ruin my life. No 1NF means no limits to how much you can nest things, nor any reason *not* to add another layer of nesting if some developer fancies it enough. When you ask people why they like it, well, "it's so FAST." (I will admit that it does scale like crazy.)

For those of you who thought nothing could make you appreciate MySQL, I offer this as an example.

Marshall Received on Thu Dec 14 2006 - 20:07:22 CET