Re: separation of church and state?

"paul c" <toledobythesea_at_ooyah.ac> wrote in message news:1yPNi.6595$_K.6240_at_pd7urf3no...
> David Cressey wrote:
> ...
> > I think you're extrapolating Date's remarks to a point that he might not
> > agree with. A table with an index is still a table.
> > ...
>
> I *suppose* it is but only in the interest of getting along with the
> rest of the world, most of whom I think would agree with you. It's just
> that I've never seen a formal definition of a table as a mathematical
> object, only as a graphical analogy to a relation, without respect to an
> algebra.

I wouldn't call a table a "graphical analogy". I'd call it a logical data structure that serves to implement the storage of a relation.

> Therefore, I don't understand how dbms's manipulate tables in
> a relational way. It seems to me that they must need to manipulate
> relations or relation variables instead.
>

An SQL DBMS manipulates tables, not relations or relational variables. Received on Sat Oct 06 2007 - 21:10:36 CEST