Re: Examples of SQL anomalies?

Just to add to that thought, a very few people, such as D&D have tried to express the db situation, problems and approaches in very precise language. Their problem is that so few people are capable of reading precisely.

As Date said, Codd was in part trying to bring a higher level of precision to talk about db. But his papers don't seem so precise today and need to be read in the context of the times he wrote them in. The majority of today's audience is ignorant of those times, when certainly the typical commercial computer management had grown up manipulating unit-record devices.

Meanwhile, over thirty years, there has been a vast expansion in the physical machinery available, so that today it is possible to simulate logical concepts that couldn't be expressed on a large scale by computers when he wrote his first papers. The history of other physical technologies shows that at least two or three generations are needed before understanding catches up with the implications of the physical inventions. Received on Wed Jul 02 2008 - 19:14:31 CEST