Oracle-L: Re: Your new book

From: Mladen Gogala <mgogala_at_adelphia.net>
Date: Wed, 22 Oct 2003 16:59:34 -0800
Message-ID: <F001.005D4009.20031022165934@fatcity.com>

On 2003.10.22 20:19, Michael Milligan wrote:

> database "experts" who purport that the "relational" in RDBMS represents
> relating tables.

Just for completeness, the definition of a relation is, quite literally, "a subset of cartesian product". Set theory studies mostly relations of ordering and equivalence relations, while RDBMS are here to implement "busines relations". And business doesn't care about the fact that every set can be well ordered. A great introduction is a book by Seymour Lipschutz called "Set Theory". I would advise against studying it because RDBMS can be well understood even without Zorn's lemma and well-ordering theorem.

-- 
Mladen Gogala
Oracle DBA
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Author: Mladen Gogala
  INET: mgogala_at_adelphia.net

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Received on Wed Oct 22 2003 - 19:59:34 CDT