Re: S.O.D.A. database Query API - [OT]

In article <B716FB50.FBA8%yan_at_studylink.com>, Janek Bogucki says...
>
>ODBMS can help eliminate the overhead of costly joins by storing the
>relationships between objects directly instead of using primary and foreign
>keys.
>

This myth again. Could you please elaborate why navigating by physical reference is always faster than navigating by logical reference? OK, one thing is that when joining 2 tables, even if we put indexes on both primary and foreign keys it would never be faster than logarithm of table size which usually translates into 3-4 disk accesses, compared to a single fetch for physical reference. I realize that, and it's not a big deal IMHO. But why people scale this conclusion into complex queries? Query optimisers in relational databases are quite sophisticated. They could drive query from detail table to master if this is more efficient, while you always navigate from master to detail in network database. The problem with complex query is that you have to sieve through the large amount of data. How can you avoid this with physical references, fetch the humangous tree of the data in main memory? Received on Sat Jul 21 2001 - 20:01:10 CEST