Re: Sigh... the evil that google does...

Bob Badour wrote:
> l.jarvensivu_at_gmail.com wrote:
>

>> Hehe, and google autosuggested this place for me. I suppose google
>> feels I've got alot in common with porn spam,

Alright, here's an old topic, the trans-relational model. (At one time, I was intrigued by it, since I don't live in the USA and therefore could ignore US patents if I wanted to try to make money off it.) One claim for it was that certain run-time sorts or index builds could be eliminated, although I seem to remember one of the big names cautioning that there might always be a 'preferred order' (sorry if I've mis-quoted and I don't mean to be sly, the people who publicized it remain deep thinkers in my book). After some study, undoubtedly inferior in parts, I concluded that one could accomplish the same 'physical' effect if every 'column' were indexed.

However, in certain cases, it seemed to me that even if Codd was approving of it (or so I remember reading), it denied his goal of 'symmetric exploitation', reason being that it depended on projections of columns that were 'adjacent' (my term) in the 'zig-zag' organization of physical columns, eg., if the zigzag connected column a to b and b to c but the query involved only columns a and c, then the result wouldn't have what I think of as a 'pleasing' order, unless a sort were invoked.

I realize that a pleasing order is counter to relational dogma but when it comes to the mundane domains such as dollars and dates that I've been indoctrinated in all my life, I find ordering of those familiar domains to be just as powerful, helpful and convenient as pretty much any logic I'm aware of. As far as I can tell, Codd's symmetric exploitation could be achieved if every permutation of 'columns' were encoded in the trans-relational intermediate layer.

I don't remember this aspect of that model ever being discussed here but I contend it is just as reasonable as Codd's original intent, which was in part to make access to data storage more intuitive.

Of course, I'd agree if Bob B said he was finding plonk maintenance onerous these days, but I have my own kind of plonk to fall back on. If it wasn't already my practice, I'd have said the current state of cdt was driving me to drink. Received on Sun May 11 2008 - 03:02:52 CEST