Re: Dreaming About Redesigning SQL

Seun Osewa wrote:
> What do you think about the so-called "Associative Model of Data"

Looks like a slightly scrambled and rather limited version of ORM. Certainly nothing new there.

> ==Unrelated to the above, but somewhat motivated by it==
> I am beginning to think there may a place for a database model that
> consists of the most commonly used subset of relational, SQL or
> aiming-to-be-relational databases.

Has already been done. See RM/T by Codd.

> Sometimes I think that, while the the separation of logical from
> physical model is a nice concept, it should not prevent those who
> understand the underlying physical implementation and the data access
> patterns of their target application from tweaking things to achieve
> acceptable performance...

That depends on your situation. If we are talking about a large database with many users and/or applications that access it then it should be the DBA that decides what is optimized for whom so he or she gets to decide what exactly the underlying physical implementation is. In that case the programmer does not and cannot know what the underlying physical implementation is. The whole idea of data independence is that the DBA is able to change this without the application noticing this, except for a difference in performance, of course.

• Jan Hidders