Rethinking the relational database

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One of us has misunderstood something fundamental.

I get the impression that the author know little or nothing about the internals of a database. The multi-user access/record locking is primarily software, has nothing to do with the actual data storage and, given that the data is rarely accessed, carries very little overhead.

The use of columns in relational databases is only a logical structure - internally the data tends to be stored in ISAM format or a variant thereof. The data is stored identically to as if it were a flat file and indexes are stored as lookup records via the primary key or physical location. Going back to first principals, the idea of an index is that since you are going to read it more often than you write it, you do the searches once when a record is written and save the result for use later. If this primary assumption is not true then don't add an index. You take the hit all at once when you search rather than spread out every time you add a record.

So the short answer is that, purely from a space point of view, there is no difference between creating a flat file and a relational database without indices.

Of course databases slow down when large volumes of data are streamed to it, due to hardware limitations and "head thrash" as the r/w head moves backwards and forwards reading different parts of the disk. Good caching will cut this down but all it really takes is to allow data to be split across drives just as indices are already. Have the offending table sitting on a seperate drive all to itself without having the slightest effect on the performance of the rest of the data. Not much of a change and there may be systems out there which already allow this.

So what's the problem which requires the proposed solution?

Posted by: MikeZD   Posted on: 05/23/05 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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