Re: Order & meaning in a proposition

> I broke down and bought the latest Date "An Introduction to Database
> Systems" text. It looks very comprehensive on the one hand and I look
> forward to reading it cover to cover, even though I have read some of it in
> prior versions.

While Date's Intro is the best out of those I have come across, none one of them, including Date's, are comprehensive. This is because RDM is but a subset of relational algebra(RA). RDM allows that subset of RA to be represented and processed very efficiently. If one's application falls within RDM's scope, and many do, then all is well.

> Without having read the entire book, there still seems to be an aspect
> missing that is integral to understanding data -- language.

Modelling information that is in sentences, even seemingly simple ones, is well beyond RDM's scope and today's computing power. That little processor between our ears is much more powerful then we will realize for yet a long time. While I haven't counted them personally, some book says, the combination of paths in one human brain is greater than the number of elementary particles (electron, proton,...) in the universe!

> Pat is the host who seated the President and the Secretary of the Interior

Presently, it is impractical for man-made dbs to truly represent/process the information in sentences such as the above. The infrastructure of related data required to truly represent even one word (ie "seated") of the sentence would leave today's dbs/processors, all but pooped out. Received on Wed Apr 07 2004 - 05:36:04 CEST