Path: news.easynews.com!core-easynews!newsfeed1.easynews.com!easynews.com!easynews!news-feed01.roc.ny.frontiernet.net!nntp.frontiernet.net!logbridge.uoregon.edu!newsfeed.stanford.edu!postnews1.google.com!not-for-mail From: alfredo@ncs.es (Alfredo Novoa) Newsgroups: comp.databases.theory Subject: Re: Do Data Models Need to built on a Mathematical Concept? Date: 5 May 2003 03:27:17 -0700 Organization: http://groups.google.com/ Lines: 26 Message-ID: References: <17ce58cf.0304240518.34ebfe22@posting.google.com> <1eSra.148357$Si4.121419@rwcrnsc51.ops.asp.att.net> NNTP-Posting-Host: 80.58.0.42 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Trace: posting.google.com 1052130437 25949 127.0.0.1 (5 May 2003 10:27:17 GMT) X-Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com NNTP-Posting-Date: 5 May 2003 10:27:17 GMT Xref: core-easynews comp.databases.theory:26170 X-Received-Date: Mon, 05 May 2003 03:26:51 MST (news.easynews.com) "Marshall Spight" wrote in message news:... > > But we don't need a standard catalog, only a standard DDL. > > Hmmm. I guess that's true. But is having a standard DDL any better > than having a standard catalog? At least is more frequent. > I observe that it's easy to model inserted rows as relational data. > (Trivial, in fact.) But it's harder to model delete and harder still > to model update. Maybe this is an argument for using a language > to do it. IMO it is a very strong argument. > But to do it this way seems an admission of failure to me. After > all, this is data that is *easily* represented as relations, and here > we go, falling back on a textual representation. We can use a binary relational language, or we can transmit the compiled canonical form relational expressions (in a p-code like format, for instance). Regards Alfredo