Re: citations of nature

Dawn M. Wolthuis <dwolt_at_tincat-group.com> schrieb:
> I suspect that most definitions of "database" leave out the user,
> however, one can certainly tighten the definition to indicate that
> someone or something must take an action to store and retrieve the
> data. I prefer the definition without an actor outside of the
> "machine". (Does the car have an engine even if no one starts or
> stops it?)

A better analogy is, is an engine an engine if it's not in a car? (Like maybe it's part of some abstract art.)

I propose that "database" is meaningless without some counterpart to data (a mutator). It's like having a universe without physical laws, a turing tape without the machine, or DNA without proteins to read it. You can only call these things databases by virtue of the fact that they are part of a system and they are the passive part of that system (though in other systems, or even in the same system, the same thing may in fact be the active part and not a database!). Received on Tue Jan 06 2004 - 22:35:18 CET