MySQL preps business upgrade

TalkBack 8 of 19:: Next »; « Previous

Thread View
Flat View

You're WAY out in Left field: You are so far away from the real world that you're looking through a straw, making up grand disaster theories about what you can see with your little view.

The world runs on databases that speak SQL, with every other data retreival technology (object-oriented, object-relational, hierarchical, etc.) lagging far behind. Saying that you find SQL "logically absurd" is just another way of saying you don't like. Who cares? You can implement your solution on your vaporware DBMS, or you can use a real RDBMS which speaks, yep!, SQL. Because that, my friend, is what everyone else in the room will understand as a relational database.

If you think the majority or even a large minority of failures in productions systems are because SQL doesn't provide a "pure" relational query language, you've just got your head in the sand (or somewhere less attractive). It might be convienent to blame a bad design, lack of analysis, or insufficient testing on the tool, but we all know that's just a diversion.

Maybe DBMS's aren't pure relational because the nature of the hardware that implements them isn't well aliged with their requirements, and therefore gives horrid performance - did that ever cross your mind?

I recall how object oriented databases were going to upset the relational dbms's in the 1990's, and how I spent 2 years as a Versant OODB DBA when my firm jumped too quickly. Today, OODB's are no more in route to upsetting RDBMS's than they were then.

What I think is innovative in DB's right now are hybrid approaches, generally referred to as "post-relational" db's, like InterSystem's "Cache" (www.intersystems.com/cache/), or Matisse (http://www.matisse.com/). Also hot among academics who have something to do with their time except obcess on realtional theory are XML query languages.

Real transactional and data warehouse database professionals are more concerned right now with performance on large volumes of data, and have no interest in the hairs you're splitting. Terra-data, for example, has solutions for "trickle feeding" your data warehouse, and solving the indexing problem on large data stores by massive parallelism.

Is there anyone actually developing solutions that get deployed in the real world who is the least bit concerned about your outrage with SQL? Not that I'm aware of. I think you're a vocal member of a very small group.; Posted by: jcg_z Posted on: 10/19/05 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use