Re: Dreaming About Redesigning SQL

"Bob Badour" <bbadour_at_golden.net> wrote in message news:uaOdnRNQMrrIZgeiU-KYiw_at_golden.net...
> >
> > I think if you reread the sentence you will see that he *does*
> > consider proximity to be a physical representation. The key
> > word is "beyond."
>
> True. I guess I have to ask: Was there any point to what he wrote?

Well, there's a weird thing going on: order encodes information. Now, us relationalists (or whatever you call 'em) explicitly say we don't care about that, and we gain some optimization benefits and some flexibility by doing so. A significant amount, in fact, so that it's easy enough to say "it's worth it."

Because of my exposure to the relational model, I'm used to thinking of data as being exclusively expressed as values or sets. But there's that nagging feeling: there's a whole different *kind* of information besides sets.

Put another way: a set contains less information than an ordered set with the same elements. That just strikes me as bizarre, and although I think I understand the situation, I certainly don't understand all the implications of it. This different kind of information is truly weird, in that it cannot exist without a set to piggyback on. An ordered empty set contains the same amount of information as the regular empty set. Hmmm, well, maybe it doesn't. See how weird?

Marshall Received on Sun Oct 26 2003 - 02:13:07 CEST