Re: Concurrency in an RDB

From: paul c <toledobythesea_at_oohay.ac>
Date: Wed, 27 Dec 2006 20:33:43 GMT
Message-ID: <HMAkh.525998$1T2.284155@pd7urf2no>

David wrote:
> paul c wrote:
>

>>David wrote:
>>...
>>
>>>Despite the logical purity there are disadvantages to be considered.
>>>Modern CPUs are quite adept at manipulating strings in the normal
>>>representation.   The space and time overheads of your suggestion are
>>>significant.
>>>...
>>
>>Actually relatively less adept than they used to be, ie., the
>>instruction sets have stagnated for decades and when applied to a
>>sequential string incur all kinds of cache misses on the latest cpu's
>>which are so much faster than the memory they use, ie., they don't come
>>close to the advertised cpu speed.

>
>
> Nevertheless I wouldn't be surprised if the string manipulation is 100
> times slower with the relational approach. Each step through a
> head-tail list would typically involve an independent search through a
> BTree.
>
> David
>

What is the point of such a notion? - is it just a strawman? What possible reason would one have to apply relational operators to strings, at least strings as most humans would read or write them? What is inherent in an arbitrary string that would benefit from the organizational or inferencing abilities of the RM?

If this is a strawman, what is the real point?

p Received on Wed Dec 27 2006 - 14:33:43 CST