Re: Dreaming About Redesigning SQL

Seun Osewa wrote:
> In other words do we have the model, the language, or standardisation
> to blame/praise for the popularity of the relational model?

Don't forget market domination.

> I would also like to know the classical arguments against the network
> model or other "pointer based" models. The only things I know are
> that:
>
> ** using pointers to positions in memory or disk can be messy when
> data has to be moved around. But then is seems there are several
> simple ways to solve this, e.g. what I can only call "logical
> pointers".

Correct. There's absolutely no reason to believe that you cannot have data independence with logical pointer or references. I would however argue that allowing entities without representable keys is not a good idea.

> ** The difficulty of performing adhoc queries. but I want to think
> that if there is a procedural (query?) language many of the advanced
> features of SQL e.g. group by and sorting of the data can be done with
> user-generated procedural code.

No. Procedural query language are a very big no no, because you should let the database choose how to optimize the queries and not let the users choose some optimizations on assumptions about how they think the data is stored.

• Jan Hidders