Re: Concurrency in an RDB

On 2006-12-23, David wrote:

> Out of interest, do you see a benefit in representing a book
> relationally, assuming it is only comprised of hierarchical chapters
> of paragraphs of text?

It almost never is, and even if it is, it almost never stays that way. Instead most books (and structured documents, and...) suffer visibly from the same problem hierarchical databases did: when the data just isn't hierarchical, you have to emulate a more general relational structure on top of the hierarchical physical layer, and that's messy. That's e.g. how you get long introductory chapters describing different tracts for people interested in different aspects of the text, an intricate and time-consuming editing process trying to balance such contradictory interests against each other and linear readability, complicated textual and layout structures expressing things like optionality and intended proficiency levels of the readers, and of course references bouncing all over the place. All of that works much better under the relational model, and the result is more or less what the early hypertext advocates envisioned.

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Sampo Syreeni, aka decoy - mailto:decoy_at_iki.fi, tel:+358-50-5756111
student/math+cs/helsinki university, http://www.iki.fi/~decoy/front
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