>
These people will wind up having to take jobs that are beneath their skill level. That is not a social or economic benefit, because that means those people are going to be contributing to society in a capacity that is less than what they're capable of contributing.
It is a economic benefit, because the current stagnation is a result of a former superproduction crisis. And it is a global benefit because it diminishes the global poverty by shifting resources from rich to poor countries. Incidentally this also helps minorating the immigration tensions.
But degrees are important, because the very definition of poverty is subjective to each culture and period.
All in all it is better to have 10 less poor big Indian families even if that means 5 less rich (by non-First World standards) US small families.
>
in India's case, finding a way to control population growth is just as important as bringing money into their economy
The best one could do for population growth is propaganda and giving pills and the such for free. And even so, Indians may yet want to have children. Moreover, the world needs them. All First World has now dwindling native population, that is hurting both economy and social relations. The real issue here is freedom of movement, not birth control. We must get back the liberties taken from us during the Great War (WWI).
>
In the end, it becomes a zero sum game, where instead of growing the economy, you've relocated part of it. That's not to the common good. To the common good would mandate that the global economy grows.
You miss the bigger culture. There is certainly an employment fear, but more often than not it is just that employers cease to compete for scarce local labor and fill their new positions elsewhere.
More important than that, companies prosper instead of failing face to competitors, are able to offer other kind of jobs, the products get cheaper, and above all more jobs are created in the Third World with higher multiplicative effect than are lost or nor created in the First World. And the Third World need them much more.
>
in Brazil, death squads roam city streets at night killing homeless children.
Interesting that there are so many yet alive.
Seriously, this is a big, big misconception. These children mostly aren't homeless: many leave home because their mothers are prostitutes, or their fathers are addicted to drugs or alcohol or are violent or all of these together. They refused to be adopted or driven to state- or church-sponsored orphanages, partly for a "Plato's cave syndrome", part for some widely-publicized instances of violent treatment by some people who were supposed to care of children in these institutions.
Some of these, reaching their teens, cease to be considered by the common people in the street, if not by the law, as children or even humans, because they fall into rape, murder, trafficking and such, being used by organised crimes for drugs and sexual exploration. There is a kind of undercover war between organised crime, the police and private security hired by shopkeepers and the such, and these teenagers are but cannon fodder for the mafiosi.
What you are referring to is probably a single incident in which several children, not teenagers, were victims of a killing spree by a death squad. Members of the squad were imprisoned, one of them turning himself in after converting to Christ.
Please either learn the facts better or refrain from affirmation.
As for the other examples, in all of them there were wars between rich autocrats and secular religious (AKA as Communists) fanatics. But at least the rich autocrat leaves the people with their own religion, and that eventually leads to him or his successor being topped. Now see the many generations under secular religions in USSR, China, or North Korea. Vietnam and Cuba aren't much better, to the point of the Cuban government sponsoring Santería, a form of the same Brasilian Macumba or Haitian Vodoo that keep thousands upon thousand in poverty, drunkenness and violence.
>
According to the World Bank [worldbank.org], which is hardly biased against Colombia for Cuba, the average Cuban female lives 5 years longer
You fail to mention Cuba reached this by first expropriating foreign property, then receiving an annual subsidy of US$5bi from the USSR. This was money taken from Central & Eastern, Asiatic and African "Communist" (NOT! rather totalitarian) people some of which were actually in hunger.
You also fail to mention Cuba has helped prop Colombian guerrilla that gave pretext to the rise of paramilitary that help keep whole portions of the country in medieval structures.
Also, just like Cingapura or China, what's the good of raising standards of living if you have to sell your soul to the party?
This is not an excuse for cruel & stupid policies at Central & South America, but really this unfortunate people were the grass in elephants' battles.
>
You conveniently neglect to mention that the new constitution was electorally approved by large margins and that Chavez was re-elected under the new constitution.
Yes. Latin Americans have a long history of electing authoritarian strong men, sometimes military, who happen to be charismatic and paint their opponents as boogeymen, using appearances of democracy to shut up opposition. Some of them seem to be leftist, others on the right, and some a strange mixture of both, like the former leftist military government of Peru. Even the Brasilian military dictatorship, being Anticommunist, distantiated itself from the US and entered the "Non-aligned" movement, helping USSR-propped (thru Cuba) African lusophone dictatorships.
>
the guy who has to pay for his own education, and then spend the next 10 years saddled with the student loans?
It is unfortunate that thesed loans have to be paid precisely when one is starting a family and has a lower salary. But other than that, it is completely fair.
>
Indian imported programmers who were trained by their government
If they do not have to pay loans nor anything to their government, it would probably be unfair to the people of India. But OTOH India is so poor that any spillover that reaches India is a great boon to them.
>
resulting in many more impoverished families who would have need of the deflated prices.
Not so fast, cowboy... when you say impoverished, you show you have no idea about what is poverty. Just pay a visit to India, or even to Guatemala which is so much nearer to you. Anyway, the net effect is always towards the common good, because the money that does not get paid you goes to poorer, not reacher, people than you. Even the money companies save ultimately enable them to hire two people instead of one, diminishing global (not local) unemployment.
The guy who lives in a poor country and therefore gets less government services and decent job opportunities in general, and besides has to (A) both learn English as a second language and (B) either (1) do all the immigration process or (2) get a job either at (a) one of the few US companies which hire overseas or (b) at one of the few in India which get work contracts from the US.
Besides, Indians will get lower pays than you, but cost of living is so low there that even if only a fraction of what he gets reach India its multiplicative effect will end up benefitting more people there than your full pay would in the US.
At the same time you getting a lower pay will help keep inflation from corroding the acquisitive power of other, especially poor people, in the US. And it will force you to study better, what will end up benefitting your employers and (or) customers.
That is how globalisation is supposed to reduce world poverty. It is indirect, slow, and requires some basic Macroeconomics knowledge to understand, but it is real. Just ask Third World farmers that are trying to get a living against First World subsidies.
>
the focus of methodology research has been on the development process itself, and that's an extremely good thing.
I am not so sure. All I have seen up to now is shuffling around, compressing, expanding or more generally fiddling around with phases of development. The issue is not to know any methodology, but not cutting corners where your successor, employer, customer or subordinates would later regret. And that seems to be above either the moral, intellectual or organizational standards mostly everywhere.
>
its time for a new language born out of practical experience implementing compilers
That is not what I want for sure. I want a language based on conceptual integrity, and then it is the compiler job doing the better of it. To me, and perhaps to Donald Knuth, having the compiler determine the language is like the cart driving the oxen.
Perhaps what I want would be more in the way of a relational Scheme or ML. But then, the missing part is the relational system, not Scheme or ML.
BTW have someone ever tried to create a compiler for Dijktra's guarded programming language?
Amazing how technology has no historical perspective. This is much older than MySQL and Qt. In fact, when people (including humble me) first suggested this to TrollTech, we had already some successful examples such as CyGNUs (the company behind eCos and much of GCC, now part of Red Hat) and Aladdin GhostScript.
>
relational databases are good for some things while object-oriented databases are good for others.
The relational model is a powerful, high-level general theory of data, while OO data management is just a mess on all accounts. It can't even decide if objects are values or variables. I dare anyone show something OO database systems can do better than RDBMSs.
About language, you are exaggerating. We don't need any new-fangled theories to know that big organisations or charismatic leaders do change words' meanings to suit themselves, and I would say this should be resisted.
>
I see a flawed implementation of relational theory (like any instatiation of an Aristotelian ideal is bound to be).
I guess you meant Platonic instead of Aristotelian. Anyway, is set theory and predicate logic an ideal that one can dispose of as he wishes? Either you get the operations right or not. SQL gets them wrong.
>
There hasn't been a massive conspiracy to control people's minds
Who needs conspiracies, when intellectual laziness and greed cooperate?
>
there has been a natural evolution of language
Relations are a Mathematical concept in set theory. Predicate logic is also scientifical. So if people start saying 2 + 2 = 5 we should assume that's just an evolution too?
>
Any data can be shoehorned into a relational model if you use enough IDs.
Again you are thinking SQL instead of relational, and working around its arbitrary limitations. What you need isn't enough IDs, but a normalised database model.
>
Consider, however, manipulating a directed acyclic (or, indeed, cyclic) graph where you need to query on "reachability" and propagate information around the network. A relational setup for this would got pretty unwieldy pretty fast.
Please do yourself a favor and get Fabian Pascal's "Practical Issues in Database Management", if you don't want to explain what was your problem and how you tried to solve it. He has some pretty neat graph examples which are simple and powerful in the relational model but nearly impossible in SQL.
>
SQL database which can handle multiple terabytes of textual data
As I said, SQL is too complex and full of arbitrary restrictions. These wouldn't be the case with a relational system.
>
XML is a basic data type
Relational datatypes are arbitrary, so there is no reason to deviate from the relational model to store whatsoever data.
>
organisations working under budgetary constraints can't afford enough DBAs
That is just because SQL is so complex. Relational systems would be to SQL as Unix is to MS-Windows: far less administration required.
>
A physical database which follows the conceptual model of the data closely is a big boon here, as there are far fewer surprises.
You are assuming the DBMS to be defective, and lots of procedural code to be needed. You are assuming DBAs' work to be needed in addition to, instead of to replace coders' work.
How it should work is that DBAs work with SysAnalysts to design the types and the logical model. Then the DBA creates the physical model according to expected load. Programmers create the declarative integrity constraints as expressions of the business rules, the DBA tunes again for performance. See how much easier it should be?
>
Guess you haven't heard of ODMG. It very much exists, however most OODBMS vendors support it incompletely.
Yes, I have, but ODMG does not a data model makes. It is a data access standard, sure enough, but based on OO ideas, not on any formal data model. At most, it is an ad-hoc data model, and thus without the power and simplicity of the relational one.
Moreover, ODMG is so disputed that probably either it will never be universal, or it will grow to be as complex as SQL or even as much as CODASYL, or worse.
>
if they come out with something that is a mutation of what has come before, people might adopt it.
So they can implement Newspeak as they want, provided they do it gradually. Remember telling the Party that before 1.984.
>
The fact that most people go along with the terminology is a strong sign that they agree with it.
Yet this might be confusing and self-defeating, as it is in this case.
>
I do know SQL, and I'm quite sure that relational databases do this.
Relational databases are supposed to, but SQL doesn't: it has no proper distinction of physical, logical and user schemas, and updateability of derived relations is arbitrarily limited. Also by way of pointers, row ids (Oracle), OIDs (PostgreSQL), undifferentiated NULLs and the like, it violates the Information Principle, and thus its rows aren't n-tuples and its tables aren't relations. You can work around some of these limitations, but not all.
>
you shouldn't be pedantic if you honestly want have a discussion.
Let me be clear and honest: I want to inform you, because you are misinformed. Now if you try to make do for information with imagination, as you tried to do and thus elicited my pedantic answer, there is no point in trying to discuss anything.
Yet that they do exist shows that it is not a technological, but a political -- as in market herd instincts -- issue.
>
it's a "Automated Application Development foundation." whatever that means.
That means that by declaring relational integrity constraints one can implement all business rules without procedural coding. Also that the interface is stored in the database.
But the reason why they are not promoting it as a RDBMS yet is that they are still working on an integrated storage engine. For now their product works as an interface to SQL DBMSs, so they don't get the full performance benefits of which the relational model is capable.
>
If Lisp, unix, and RISC have manged to survive so far why hasn't the "truly relational database".
Because all these survived in higly technical environments, or at least under the sponsorship of technically-oriented SysAdmins. OTOH DBMSs are more commercially oriented, so they fell under the spell of IBM.
>
Yea OK whatever.
I am sure you realise that a data access library is just a fraction of the effort to make a RDBMS. Alphora for one all but dismissed Sleepycat as a storage engine; what they need to make Dataphor a full, integrated RDBMS is more in the line of InnoDB than Sleepycat.
>
I meant the thing that 99% of people think of as a relational database.
Unfortunately, that is vendor Newspeak, not reality.
>
Are there existing products that you feel provide the full power of the relational model?
Alphora Dataphor does not provide the full power, but at least it does not violate any principles. Thus it offers, say, something like 50% of the relational model instead of the 20% SQL does. Obviously the numbers are just feelings, but the reality behind these feelings is solid.
Even if it is a proprietary and expensive product, you still can try a fully functioning demo of Dataphor.
If you can't buy some books, then you have to make do with that. Or perhaps offer them some help?
>
they should hurry up or risk being ignored yet more.
These guys have been toiling from 20 to 30 years now. The Net, and mission critical free software, is a new occurrence to them. They need time to adapt, they are not young.
>
the cursor-centric approach of XBase has value for some applications or techniques.
Cursors are just a feature of the client library or of the database cache. They have nothing to do with a database model. Even SQL does cursors quite nicely.
>
That's the way language works: what people mean when they say something is what the word means
Even when clearly it is vendor Newspeak? Scary your definition of language.
>
These databases are implementations of the relational model.
They aren't, because they don't comply with the basic principles of the relational model. If you disagree, either you don't know the relational model principles, or you don't know SQL, or you're dishonest.
>
If you want to talk about a database that does a better job of implementing the relational model, call it a "True Relational" or "Pure Relational" or something like that.
I understand your point, but you forget that then I would have to explain what's "True Relational" and why SQL isn't it. So there is more trouble, not less.
>
I don't think that's what happened here. I think a couple of vendors implemented the relational model, and people started calling them relational databases.
You should not "think" if you do not know History. What happened was that SQL was created against Codd's orientation, so it was never relational in the first place. Codd even has quitted IBM because of that.
>
Most of the XML-enabled RDBMS could do basically the same thing, but it seemed like a bad fit to use a RDBMS with a totally non-relational approach.
Again, a relational system (like Dataphor) makes it simple to either decompose the tags and contents in a recursive structure, or to define suitable domains. There is nothing non-relational to that. The problem again is SQL not being a RDBMS.
>
The overwhelming majority of SQL-based DBMSes are not true relational databases.
No SQL system is relational, because SQL in and by itself violates the relational principles.
>
A lot of data (probably "most") does not fit neatly into the relational model.
All data can fit neatly into the relational model, provided one defines the domains and normalise.
>
XML-driven databases are close to perfect if you're storing and indexing documents.
XML DBMSs won't scale, because they are too complex. In fact, they are just a throw away to the hierarchical DBs that were tried and dumped thirty years ago because of complexity.
>
trying to index text using a relational system is pretty close to the dictionary definition of "insane".
Why? Just make text a supported data type. In fact, even SQL databases can do that.
>
Forcing them to stay on their toes by giving them a system they have to fight with is no answer.
And that's one of the big relational advantages. It can hold any data, optimising access for itself, under a consistent model. Only the DBA has to worry about the physical schema.
>
OODBMSes have a lot of promise, but there are no standards which are adhered to.
The problem is actually worse. There is no OO data model to adhere to, so creating a standard would have to cater to too many different goals. Just look at CODASYL, and weep. An OO standard would probably be much more complex than CODASYL ever was.
Slashdot Mirror
It isn't neither functional nor relational.
That is why my dream is a funcional, relational OS -- something built around a Scheme or Lisp D, as in Date and Darwen's The Third Manifesto.
It is a economic benefit, because the current stagnation is a result of a former superproduction crisis. And it is a global benefit because it diminishes the global poverty by shifting resources from rich to poor countries. Incidentally this also helps minorating the immigration tensions.
So please tone down the text on your site, the way it still is, it is calling for strong action from everyone.
But degrees are important, because the very definition of poverty is subjective to each culture and period.
All in all it is better to have 10 less poor big Indian families even if that means 5 less rich (by non-First World standards) US small families.
The best one could do for population growth is propaganda and giving pills and the such for free. And even so, Indians may yet want to have children. Moreover, the world needs them. All First World has now dwindling native population, that is hurting both economy and social relations. The real issue here is freedom of movement, not birth control. We must get back the liberties taken from us during the Great War (WWI).
You miss the bigger culture. There is certainly an employment fear, but more often than not it is just that employers cease to compete for scarce local labor and fill their new positions elsewhere.
More important than that, companies prosper instead of failing face to competitors, are able to offer other kind of jobs, the products get cheaper, and above all more jobs are created in the Third World with higher multiplicative effect than are lost or nor created in the First World. And the Third World need them much more.
Think globally.
Interesting that there are so many yet alive.
Seriously, this is a big, big misconception. These children mostly aren't homeless: many leave home because their mothers are prostitutes, or their fathers are addicted to drugs or alcohol or are violent or all of these together. They refused to be adopted or driven to state- or church-sponsored orphanages, partly for a "Plato's cave syndrome", part for some widely-publicized instances of violent treatment by some people who were supposed to care of children in these institutions.
Some of these, reaching their teens, cease to be considered by the common people in the street, if not by the law, as children or even humans, because they fall into rape, murder, trafficking and such, being used by organised crimes for drugs and sexual exploration. There is a kind of undercover war between organised crime, the police and private security hired by shopkeepers and the such, and these teenagers are but cannon fodder for the mafiosi.
What you are referring to is probably a single incident in which several children, not teenagers, were victims of a killing spree by a death squad. Members of the squad were imprisoned, one of them turning himself in after converting to Christ.
Please either learn the facts better or refrain from affirmation.
As for the other examples, in all of them there were wars between rich autocrats and secular religious (AKA as Communists) fanatics. But at least the rich autocrat leaves the people with their own religion, and that eventually leads to him or his successor being topped. Now see the many generations under secular religions in USSR, China, or North Korea. Vietnam and Cuba aren't much better, to the point of the Cuban government sponsoring Santería, a form of the same Brasilian Macumba or Haitian Vodoo that keep thousands upon thousand in poverty, drunkenness and violence.
You fail to mention Cuba reached this by first expropriating foreign property, then receiving an annual subsidy of US$5bi from the USSR. This was money taken from Central & Eastern, Asiatic and African "Communist" (NOT! rather totalitarian) people some of which were actually in hunger.
You also fail to mention Cuba has helped prop Colombian guerrilla that gave pretext to the rise of paramilitary that help keep whole portions of the country in medieval structures.
Also, just like Cingapura or China, what's the good of raising standards of living if you have to sell your soul to the party?
This is not an excuse for cruel & stupid policies at Central & South America, but really this unfortunate people were the grass in elephants' battles.
Yes. Latin Americans have a long history of electing authoritarian strong men, sometimes military, who happen to be charismatic and paint their opponents as boogeymen, using appearances of democracy to shut up opposition. Some of them seem to be leftist, others on the right, and some a strange mixture of both, like the former leftist military government of Peru. Even the Brasilian military dictatorship, being Anticommunist, distantiated itself from the US and entered the "Non-aligned" movement, helping USSR-propped (thru Cuba) African lusophone dictatorships.
It is unfortunate that thesed loans have to be paid precisely when one is starting a family and has a lower salary. But other than that, it is completely fair.
If they do not have to pay loans nor anything to their government, it would probably be unfair to the people of India. But OTOH India is so poor that any spillover that reaches India is a great boon to them.
Not so fast, cowboy... when you say impoverished, you show you have no idea about what is poverty. Just pay a visit to India, or even to Guatemala which is so much nearer to you. Anyway, the net effect is always towards the common good, because the money that does not get paid you goes to poorer, not reacher, people than you. Even the money companies save ultimately enable them to hire two people instead of one, diminishing global (not local) unemployment.
Do you already use cache in NFS or SMB? I don't even know if it exists in SMB.
If you don't use caching already, and if its lack doesn't affect the functionality of AFS, no loss in trying.
The guy who lives in a poor country and therefore gets less government services and decent job opportunities in general, and besides has to (A) both learn English as a second language and (B) either (1) do all the immigration process or (2) get a job either at (a) one of the few US companies which hire overseas or (b) at one of the few in India which get work contracts from the US.
Besides, Indians will get lower pays than you, but cost of living is so low there that even if only a fraction of what he gets reach India its multiplicative effect will end up benefitting more people there than your full pay would in the US.
At the same time you getting a lower pay will help keep inflation from corroding the acquisitive power of other, especially poor people, in the US. And it will force you to study better, what will end up benefitting your employers and (or) customers.
That is how globalisation is supposed to reduce world poverty. It is indirect, slow, and requires some basic Macroeconomics knowledge to understand, but it is real. Just ask Third World farmers that are trying to get a living against First World subsidies.
I am not so sure. All I have seen up to now is shuffling around, compressing, expanding or more generally fiddling around with phases of development. The issue is not to know any methodology, but not cutting corners where your successor, employer, customer or subordinates would later regret. And that seems to be above either the moral, intellectual or organizational standards mostly everywhere.
That is not what I want for sure. I want a language based on conceptual integrity, and then it is the compiler job doing the better of it. To me, and perhaps to Donald Knuth, having the compiler determine the language is like the cart driving the oxen.
Perhaps what I want would be more in the way of a relational Scheme or ML. But then, the missing part is the relational system, not Scheme or ML.
BTW have someone ever tried to create a compiler for Dijktra's guarded programming language?
Amazing how technology has no historical perspective. This is much older than MySQL and Qt. In fact, when people (including humble me) first suggested this to TrollTech, we had already some successful examples such as CyGNUs (the company behind eCos and much of GCC, now part of Red Hat) and Aladdin GhostScript.
Canada free trade? Are you kidding? Ever heard of protection & subsidies to farmers and airplane manufacturers?
The relational model is a powerful, high-level general theory of data, while OO data management is just a mess on all accounts. It can't even decide if objects are values or variables. I dare anyone show something OO database systems can do better than RDBMSs.
About language, you are exaggerating. We don't need any new-fangled theories to know that big organisations or charismatic leaders do change words' meanings to suit themselves, and I would say this should be resisted.
I guess you meant Platonic instead of Aristotelian. Anyway, is set theory and predicate logic an ideal that one can dispose of as he wishes? Either you get the operations right or not. SQL gets them wrong.
Who needs conspiracies, when intellectual laziness and greed cooperate?
Relations are a Mathematical concept in set theory. Predicate logic is also scientifical. So if people start saying 2 + 2 = 5 we should assume that's just an evolution too?
C'mon.
Again you are thinking SQL instead of relational, and working around its arbitrary limitations. What you need isn't enough IDs, but a normalised database model.
Please do yourself a favor and get Fabian Pascal's "Practical Issues in Database Management", if you don't want to explain what was your problem and how you tried to solve it. He has some pretty neat graph examples which are simple and powerful in the relational model but nearly impossible in SQL.
As I said, SQL is too complex and full of arbitrary restrictions. These wouldn't be the case with a relational system.
Relational datatypes are arbitrary, so there is no reason to deviate from the relational model to store whatsoever data.
That is just because SQL is so complex. Relational systems would be to SQL as Unix is to MS-Windows: far less administration required.
You are assuming the DBMS to be defective, and lots of procedural code to be needed. You are assuming DBAs' work to be needed in addition to, instead of to replace coders' work.
How it should work is that DBAs work with SysAnalysts to design the types and the logical model. Then the DBA creates the physical model according to expected load. Programmers create the declarative integrity constraints as expressions of the business rules, the DBA tunes again for performance. See how much easier it should be?
Yes, I have, but ODMG does not a data model makes. It is a data access standard, sure enough, but based on OO ideas, not on any formal data model. At most, it is an ad-hoc data model, and thus without the power and simplicity of the relational one.
Moreover, ODMG is so disputed that probably either it will never be universal, or it will grow to be as complex as SQL or even as much as CODASYL, or worse.
So they can implement Newspeak as they want, provided they do it gradually. Remember telling the Party that before 1.984.
Yet this might be confusing and self-defeating, as it is in this case.
Relational databases are supposed to, but SQL doesn't: it has no proper distinction of physical, logical and user schemas, and updateability of derived relations is arbitrarily limited. Also by way of pointers, row ids (Oracle), OIDs (PostgreSQL), undifferentiated NULLs and the like, it violates the Information Principle, and thus its rows aren't n-tuples and its tables aren't relations. You can work around some of these limitations, but not all.
Let me be clear and honest: I want to inform you, because you are misinformed. Now if you try to make do for information with imagination, as you tried to do and thus elicited my pedantic answer, there is no point in trying to discuss anything.
Yet that they do exist shows that it is not a technological, but a political -- as in market herd instincts -- issue.
That means that by declaring relational integrity constraints one can implement all business rules without procedural coding. Also that the interface is stored in the database.
But the reason why they are not promoting it as a RDBMS yet is that they are still working on an integrated storage engine. For now their product works as an interface to SQL DBMSs, so they don't get the full performance benefits of which the relational model is capable.
Because all these survived in higly technical environments, or at least under the sponsorship of technically-oriented SysAdmins. OTOH DBMSs are more commercially oriented, so they fell under the spell of IBM.
I am sure you realise that a data access library is just a fraction of the effort to make a RDBMS. Alphora for one all but dismissed Sleepycat as a storage engine; what they need to make Dataphor a full, integrated RDBMS is more in the line of InnoDB than Sleepycat.
Unfortunately, that is vendor Newspeak, not reality.
Alphora Dataphor does not provide the full power, but at least it does not violate any principles. Thus it offers, say, something like 50% of the relational model instead of the 20% SQL does. Obviously the numbers are just feelings, but the reality behind these feelings is solid.
Even if it is a proprietary and expensive product, you still can try a fully functioning demo of Dataphor.
Not true. Relational does do hierarchies well. The problem here is SQL.
OO is also procedural. Relational OTOH enables one to think in sets and declarations, thus saving much more programming than OO could.
This is a fault of SQL, not of the relational model.
?!?
On the contrary, the relational model provides data independence that both SQL and OO deny.
Then go read The Third Manifesto to learn how much better the relational model is than SQL.
If you can't buy some books, then you have to make do with that. Or perhaps offer them some help?
These guys have been toiling from 20 to 30 years now. The Net, and mission critical free software, is a new occurrence to them. They need time to adapt, they are not young.
Cursors are just a feature of the client library or of the database cache. They have nothing to do with a database model. Even SQL does cursors quite nicely.
I actually know of three relational systems: Ingres QUEL (obsolete), IBM BS12 (not available), and Dataphor Alphora.
Just look at Intel vs RISC, or MS-WXP vs Unix, or C vs Lisp.
Sleepycat does a library, not a full DBMS.
Even when clearly it is vendor Newspeak? Scary your definition of language.
They aren't, because they don't comply with the basic principles of the relational model. If you disagree, either you don't know the relational model principles, or you don't know SQL, or you're dishonest.
I understand your point, but you forget that then I would have to explain what's "True Relational" and why SQL isn't it. So there is more trouble, not less.
You should not "think" if you do not know History. What happened was that SQL was created against Codd's orientation, so it was never relational in the first place. Codd even has quitted IBM because of that.
Again, a relational system (like Dataphor) makes it simple to either decompose the tags and contents in a recursive structure, or to define suitable domains. There is nothing non-relational to that. The problem again is SQL not being a RDBMS.
No SQL system is relational, because SQL in and by itself violates the relational principles.
All data can fit neatly into the relational model, provided one defines the domains and normalise.
XML DBMSs won't scale, because they are too complex. In fact, they are just a throw away to the hierarchical DBs that were tried and dumped thirty years ago because of complexity.
Why? Just make text a supported data type. In fact, even SQL databases can do that.
And that's one of the big relational advantages. It can hold any data, optimising access for itself, under a consistent model. Only the DBA has to worry about the physical schema.
The problem is actually worse. There is no OO data model to adhere to, so creating a standard would have to cater to too many different goals. Just look at CODASYL, and weep. An OO standard would probably be much more complex than CODASYL ever was.