Re: foundations of relational theory? - some references for the truly starving

> It's late and I no idea whether these are known to anyone or everyone,
> but I remember this, commissioned by Unidata, now an IBM db: maybe it's
> of use?
>
> http://www-3.ibm.com/software/data/u2/pubs/whitepapers/nested_rdbms.pdf

That's a marketing hogwash containing blatant inaccuracies and downright idiotic claims:

"
  2) Normalization of the tables requires the order number and the customer number attributes be stored twice for each order

  3) Producing a report to show the data as in (Figure 1) requires thatb the three tables be joined. Joined are highly compute intensive operations. "

So, the paper is way below academic standards and a student that makes this claim should fail the DB 101.

Look guys, rightly or wrongly it is *you* that have a very practical problem in the market place. You'll have more credence when SAP or PeopleSoft will run on Pick DB.Not that they have great database designs according to relational theory, they don't, but if you want to be judged by practical standards you're way behind any major commercial SQL database.

You could compensate if you wanted by a careful thought out scientific work to prove exactly what your model buys the user. Actually, the work was kind of done for you, theorists have analyzed the model and reached the logical conclusion that there's not much to it. Even more, the model is already available one way or the other in existing SQL DBMSes, but typically I don't use it and most people don't use it, for very practical reasons.

You can't blame the "theorists" when you have very practical and serious problems, like for example your clients investing in an obsoleted technology with problematic future. And it is ridiculous for you guys to whine that theorists disregard your model, actually they don't, it's described in all theory books (now that I know it's actually about nested relations), they just are not so crazy about its virtues. Received on Tue Oct 21 2003 - 18:36:24 CEST