Re: native xml processing vs what Postgres and Oracle offer

"paul c" <toledobythesea_at_oohay.ac> wrote in message news:TzwZk.2286$si6.792_at_edtnps83...
> Brian Selzer wrote:
> ...
>> Does that mean that you now acknowledge the fact that a forum is in
>> essence heirarchical? ...
>
>
> Nope. You can display messages that way, store them that way if you
> insist (I wouldn't), but if your programming operators don't use a
> relational structure or an similarly powerful abstraction/indirection
> (assuming that somewhere, somebody has devised such a thing), you are
> giving up what Codd called symmetric exploitation.
>

So you're saying that what looks like a rose, smells like a rose--has thorns like a rose--isn't a rose?

>
> Looks to me that anybody who uses xml or its ilk to manipulate data gives
> up that ability from the get-go. I can sympathize with people who are
> more or less forced by common platforms to display things by using that
> ponderous and closed-door syntax but syntax has nothing to do with data
> design. Using a hierarchical data interface, which is actually what the
> OP was assuming, is just asking for endless headaches from my point of
> view although I will admit that technocrats see it differently, as "jobs
> for the boys". Of course, when a requirement you didn't first imagine
> came up, you could invent some attributes to make your hierarchy look like
> relations but that seems like a lot of wasted work to me. It would be
> easier to start with relations.
>
>
> This thread reminds me of long-ago meetings that truly never ended because
> there was always somebody who didn't get the basic point and would drag
> them on forever. I knew a former jet pilot who went into data modelling
> to avoid a lifetime hitch under a dictator. When he tried to sell a
> simpler but more versatile programming model, one transport industry
> customer just couldn't make the switch. He compared them to hot air
> balloon users who didn't think winged vehicles would work because the
> typical plane doesn't have a gondola.
>
>
> The other day, I saw a djikstra note that mentions this inability at:
> http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd10xx/EWD1036.PDF
>
>
> He suggested a general ignorance and fear of what he called "radical
> novelty". I don't know if he ever met Codd and if he did whether their
> conversation was on-topic or more mundane (as it was when Groucho met
> Eliot and Ford met Edison, for the first time)!
>
>
>
Received on Thu Dec 04 2008 - 04:02:54 CET