Re: Navigation question

"Tony D" <tonyisyourpal_at_netscape.net> wrote in message news:1171648378.363589.27160_at_j27g2000cwj.googlegroups.com...

> All this talk of "nodes", and "then", and "going to" and so on -
> that's not what's happening. There is no "moving finger" that you
> guide through the database from table A to table B. You are issuing
> multiple independent queries with (hopefully) increasingly defined
> parameters. There is no connection between them, other than some
> shared parameters. Even in an SQL DBMS, you *cannot* "navigate" around
> tables.

It is possible to write Oracle applications that proceed in precisely this fashion. I have seen them. They are lousy. They deliver bad performance. They are hard to learn. They are difficult to modify.

In general, they fail to deliver the "bang for the buck" that proponents claim for the relational model.
They combine all the inflexibility and opaqueness that traditional graph based DBMS applications suffered from with the performance cost of using indexes instead of pointers embedded in records.

Anybody who goes about things this way will, unless she sees and understands a well built Oracle application, conclude that the relational model was one big mistake. I'm using Oracle just for the sake of example. You can substitute any of a dozen other products, and my comments still aply.

That appears to be precisely what Dawn did. She led several application development teams, and all of them delivered mediocre results. She then led a Pick team, and was impressed with what they acheived. Since that time, she's been a "passionate" MV model proponent. You can look all this up in the c.d.t. archives stored by Google groups.

The fact that thousands of good applications were built in the same time frame using Oracle, DB2, SQL Server, Postgres, and dozens of other soi disant "relational DBMSes" is of no consequence to Dawn. She simply dismisses those acheivements as "not empirical evidence".

The fact that thousands of other poorly built applications were built in the same time frame doesn't detract from the possibility of doing things right, even though the soi disant "relational DBMSes" have flaws, even major flaws, that c.d.t. discusses regularly. Received on Sun Feb 18 2007 - 14:44:52 CET