Path: dp-news.maxwell.syr.edu!spool.maxwell.syr.edu!drn.maxwell.syr.edu!news.maxwell.syr.edu!border1.nntp.dca.giganews.com!nntp.giganews.com!local1.nntp.dca.giganews.com!nntp.comcast.com!news.comcast.com.POSTED!not-for-mail NNTP-Posting-Date: Sat, 09 Oct 2004 22:08:45 -0500 Reply-To: "Laconic2" From: "Laconic2" Newsgroups: comp.databases.theory References: <2srhtgF1ldm0vU1@uni-berlin.de> Subject: Re: 4 the FAQ: Are Commercial DBMS Truly Relational? Date: Sat, 9 Oct 2004 23:08:27 -0400 X-Priority: 3 X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Newsreader: Microsoft Outlook Express 6.00.2800.1437 X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V6.00.2800.1441 Message-ID: Lines: 22 NNTP-Posting-Host: 24.60.68.134 X-Trace: sv3-YPjCli1/Ve7MlwXuO79tocNj4fqoX11Bv67Ec7Hf+AwwiZz+ej3Jx5shzgGl2AnOZzH11gmxk7WNsld!DvmrFJL7li0USlUlcuyNyR8G77L67C4/eVhhoj00fKZToq5uV2R2uq0f3u1p X-Complaints-To: abuse@comcast.net X-DMCA-Complaints-To: dmca@comcast.net X-Abuse-and-DMCA-Info: Please be sure to forward a copy of ALL headers X-Abuse-and-DMCA-Info: Otherwise we will be unable to process your complaint properly X-Postfilter: 1.3.19 Xref: dp-news.maxwell.syr.edu comp.databases.theory:26714 "Christopher Browne" wrote in message news:2srhtgF1ldm0vU1@uni-berlin.de... > I have nothing against Celko, but I'm not particularly interested in > depending on having overly clever DBAs around to construct overly > baroque SQL queries to compute things. It's good to have the ability > to do such queries, but using them for "production" work smacks indeed > of "doing magick." There's plenty enough magick around already. > There's plenty of unmaintainable Perl. More than enough > unmaintainable C++. More than enough unmaintainable Java. And > ABAP/4. And so forth. > That's another reason why I used to like Datatrieve so much. You could pull data out, do relational joins, restricts and projections on it, and other manipulations, then turn around and push the result through a regular old report writer with hierarchical control breaks in it. It was so easy that, if you didn't watch carefully, you'd think it was automatic.