Re: Network databases

On 13 Jan 2005 08:23:43 -0800, lynn_at_garlic.com wrote:

>All of this was being traded off against savings in people time
>(becoming scarcer and more expensive) which were having to deal with
>increasing size of data to be managed (by the relative increase in
>disk space sizes).

But it is not a necessary trade off. System R is a piece of museum now.

>so somewhat in parallel with some of this ... there was small
>contingent in blg. 90 looking at doing a "modern" network database
>implementation

And it seems that they disappeared in the 00s.

> ... doing a lot of abstracting so that the database
>users are separated from a lot of low-level physical database gorp
>... in much the same way that system/r had abstracted a lot of those
>details in relational. Some amount of the higher level abstraction
>work was also influenced by Sowa. So they came up with a query
>language paradigm that removed the physical pointer and lots of the
>network navigation characteristics from the interface (anologous to
>what SQL accomplished).

SQL removed all network navigation characteristics. At least until SQL 2003. But SQL never was relational.

> eventually they came to wanted to do a
>side-by-side comparison with db2 on a level playing field.

But DB2 is not a relational DBMS.

>The SQL query statements were on the order of 3-5 times larger and
>more complex ...

Besides not being relational, SQL is a bad designed language. But I don't trust any comparison without knowing the details. Specially whether it is related to computers :).

Regards Received on Fri Jan 14 2005 - 17:56:16 CET