Re: The Relational Model & Queries That Naturally Return Duplicate Rows

On Oct 10, 6:36 am, Erwin <e.sm..._at_myonline.be> wrote:

> I'm also curious as to why he's asking to be pointed out what I think
> should be obvious, but then again recent discussions on other subjects
> have revealed to me that there is no predicting when people will fail
> to see the obvious, merely because of certain kinds of mental block
> they happen to be suffering from.

I think the underlying problem is that we often fail to distinguish between belief and what's formally provable from axioms or perhaps more importantly to realise that it's an emphasis on the latter that leads to real progress in any branch of mathematics, and surely database theory should be treated that way (and not like a religion).

The phrase "an ideal RDBMS" doesn't appeal to what's provable. Can "ideal" be defined uniquely and mathematically? I doubt it.

So rather that claim the answer is obvious, I would claim that the OP's subjective question is meaningless in the context of database theory. Received on Mon Oct 11 2010 - 03:51:38 CEST