Re: Quote from comp.object

On Feb 27, 7:09 am, "frebe" <freb..._at_gmail.com> wrote:
> "A typical SQL DBMS requires _drastically_ faster hardware than a
> hierarchical database to provide even roughly equivalent response time

  This is true. But so what? The whole point of relational (SQL) DBMSs wasn't that they would outperform CODASYL data managers. The point was that CODASYL technologies made it very hard and very expensive (in terms of people time) to solve practical problems. Relational approaches made information management cheaper.

> -- to the point that a SQL DBMS running on current hardware is about
> the
> same speed (or slighthly slower) than a hierarchical database was
> around
> 25 years ago, running on hardware that was current at the time.

 Complete bullshit. 25 years in computer time is a 1000 fold (2^10) improvement in computer hardware.

> As far as normalization goes: back then, normalization was a way of
> life
> -- normalization reduces redundancy, and given the cost of storage at
> the time, redundancy was _expensive_ (even ignoring inflation, one
> month's rent on a 1.8 GB disk drive in 1982 would buy enough disks for
> quite a large RAID today). "

  Also bullshit. You can't normalize a hierarchical data model. Received on Tue Feb 27 2007 - 19:01:04 CET