Re: TRM - Morbidity has set in, or not?

Marshall Spight wrote:
> Frank Hamersley wrote:
>

>>Is there any veracity in _any_ of the claims made by _any_ of the parties?
>>
>>Given lots of mud gets flung as the discussion proceeds so I wondered if
>>there was any corroborative or contrary sources.

Yeah, other than the patent application - which is tortuous - there's little out there. To confuse the issue, other products are described as transrelational - Cache, IIRC, is one.

  I can't
> find
> anything to suggest that it's anything besides a traditional column
> store.
> Various parties, including FP himself, have on occasion said, "oh no,
> it's much more than that" but they don't back it up at all, so their
> claims
> are unevaluable.

It *is* much more that a column store storage scheme. I don't know whether you've read a description of TRM, but it features (a) a not-so-surprising ordered collection of observed values, (b) a mildly clever permutation and inverse permutation index, and (c) a very clever "record reconstruction table."

> Michael Stonebreaker has a small company that is selling a column
> store; it looks quite interesting.

If we're talking about the C-Store he was involved with, it does feature a column-wise storage scheme. But, unlike TRM, values will appear in storage just as many times as they appear in the "logical" records being represented. C-Store makes extensive use of compression and, IIRC, is able to performs restricts and selects based on the compressed representations of values. Besides that, one of C-Store's big features is a technique for replicating a data store at different sites and knowing, at all sites, the most recent instant for which all sites have the same values.

> As an aside, I note that Mr. Pascal spends quite a lot of time telling
> us
> how smart and logical he is,

I'm not sure that's right; he's certainly not shy about voicing his opinions -- and presenting them as certainties. Many of them probably are, although the context in which he makes his remarks is often opaque.

  and how all of his opponents are stupid,
> ignorant, and illogical.

That's certainly true -- but he explains why. At least, every now and again.

  He also spends a lot of time name calling, and
> even making fun of other people's names!

Hmm.. I've never seen him cast the first stone.

  I wonder: has he ever
> accomplished anything that would back up his claims? Has he ever
> published a proof? Published a paper in a peer-reviewed journal?
> Made use of any formal methods? Written any software? To my
> knowledge, he has published two books, one of them "Practical
> Issues is Database Management". Which was a fine book, although
> the last person I leant it to noted "you could hear the axe grinding
> on every page."

Maybe so. I've read the book (even caught a mistake which resulted in an entry in his Errata) and I have to admit: at time, his tone could be described as "reactionary." But, you know, Codd's RM/V2 was somewhat like that, too. Reading between the lines, I could sense that some of what was in that volume - T-joins, for example - were reactions to features the network model implementations offered while others - what Codd called "required features," I think - were meant to point out defects in other database implementations. Received on Sat May 13 2006 - 02:45:45 CEST