Re: Resiliency To New Data Requirements

dawn wrote:
> Perhaps it would be more precise to say that they "threw the baby out
> with the bathwater." I found arguments, but no emperical data, that
> showed the relational model to be beneficial to those using it. If you
> are aware of any emperical data, particularly any that shows that the
> RM is more flexible over time than either MUMPS or PICK that predate
> it, I would really like to see that.

The original debate over the relative merits of hierarchical vs relational DBMS included an example of a program written for the hierarchical system that had something like 60 lines of code and at least a couple of bugs in the code, whereas the equivalent relational code to answer the same problem had about 4 lines of code (and no bugs).   You'd find that material in C J Date's original 'Relational Database: Selected Writings' book, IIRC (my copy is boxed in the garage - I can't easily validate that assertion; it was in a C J Date book). Additionally, the relational code would have continued to work under many reasonable physical reorganizations of the tables; the non-relational code would not.

OK - that comparison is not with MUMPS or PICK, but there was certainly empirical data about the benefits of relational over (some) non-relational DBMS.

-- 
Jonathan Leffler                   #include <disclaimer.h>
Email: jleffler_at_earthlink.net, jleffler_at_us.ibm.com
Guardian of DBD::Informix v2005.02 -- http://dbi.perl.org/