If you don't have your receipt, we can't take it back.
I went to Best Buy and bought a new cable modem before I went over to a clients' house to work on an "internet is broken" problem. Turns out the router just wasn't plugged in.
Anyway, the cable modem sat in my truck for a few days (a week maybe?), and it got quite hot a few days that week. When I took the cable modem back to Best Buy to return it, the thermal receipt was wholly blank. Best Buy would only return it for in-store credit since I "didn't have my receipt". I know it was partly my fault for leaving it in the truck, but I had the Best Buy bag, the cable modem still in shrink-wrapped plastic, and a piece of paper that looked like a valid receipt.
It looks like you're trying to find a "better way" to store these vast libraries of CD and DVD materials rather than rolling your own. You should contact a company that builds multi-tier racking for books, cd's tapes, x-rays, etc. The companies that make x-ray film libraries in the US do the same thing for other media types as well.
Sounds like a good idea. Seriously. As somewhat of an inventor myself, here's a few starting points...
Investors don't like plunking down money without a very solid concept of what it is they are paying for.
Start with a drawing (any flavour of CAD will do) of the design down to the nuts and bolts that hold it together. That will give you a good idea of the raw materials that will be needed to build the contraption.
Spec the code that will need to be written for your microcontrollers. Don't write the code. Just write the high level logic that would be used to write the code. This will be good for estimates on time to flesh out the code. You need good coding estimates to plan when you can deliver the first prototype.
Read one of the most mocked quotes of Donald Rumsfeld a few times. You are going to have to write down the things that do do not know. Things that might go wrong, things that you'll have to "figure out", things that you will need help with, etc. You (obviously) cannot write down the things you do not know, but a little risk management goes a long way towards getting funding. People with money like to know the "known unknowns".
Profit is a Good Thing(TM). Explain in one paragraph (should be REALLY easy considering what you're talking about) how this investment will make money. Yes, it should be shared with everyone. But your initial investor will need to make his money back over a limited period of time. Selling a few of these to make your investor some money will be a necessity.
Outside help is always good. Someone else to talk over the guts of the thing. You can't do everything by yourself, and you might get to spend a few nights with your family instead of slaving away at a life-long project...:) Fire me an email if you'd like.
As someone who can't stand to take tests, I offer the following experience:
Drink nothing but water for two days prior to the test. It will flush much of the caffene and sugary drinks out of your system. Eat non-fast food as well - there's more chemical preservatives in a McDonald's cheeseburger than you can imagine. Think pasta and/or steak.
The night before the test, take two Tylenol PM capsules and go to bed at 6:00PM. Yes, early. The REM sleep really burns the stuff you've studied for into your brain.
Get up an hour before you would normally get up, and get ready to go (shower, etc). A morning shower is a good waker-upper, and the extra hour will get rid of sleep inertia.
Go to the nearest gas station or convenience store and get a great big glass of orange juice. The vitamins in OJ really help in the morning. Obviously you could drink it at home, but the extra stop and go-in at someplace you don't normally go helps to sharpen your early-morning brain a bit more as well.
The flushing of all the chemicals in your system will help loads. The extra sleep will give you energy through the dull test, and the OJ will give you a morning brain-kick. All natural even.
It doesn't stop there; there's a 12-cylinder BMW or $100,000 dollars for the development of the best wireless application.
And from the article:
SCO is also offering a 10-cylinder BMW car or a US$100,000 cash prize for the developers who use the toolkit to produce the best wireless applications.
So either the poster or SCO itself isn't firing on all cylinders?
Writing a FS filter requires the IFSKit, which is expensive and does not come with an MSDN license.
Just so you know, Microsoft dropped the price for the IFS kit from over $1000 to less than $150 including shipping ($25 for shipping a CD... wowza!) a few months ago. You can purchase it online at the IFS kit page. That's a much easier pill to swallow for a PhD investment.
First, let's get the slashdot mentality out of the way.
You're evil because all source code should be free, no matter how much blood, sweat, and tears were put into it.
Your design is fracked and you should go out of business because you suck.
It's technically impossible to keep code secure, so again, youre fracked.
There. That's a little better.
Two Distinctly Different Problems
Your question has an unstated assumption that might be steering you in the wrong direction. You assumed that you have to release your source code. You might not have to do that...
Application Layers
In the theoretical world, a web application has the following components:
Back-end storage system, typically some SQL server variant
Business rules of some sort, most likely the location of the true IP of the company
A presentataion layer such as PHP or JSP that presents/manipulates the business data
A web server to execute the presentation layer
Given these layers, what are you willing to open up? The web server is probably already open source or an off-the-shelf purchased product. Same with the back-end storage system. This leaves the presentation layer and the business rules layer. What are your top-tier customers going to do to your application? Change the way it looks, change the way it behaves, or add missing functionality? You need to know the answers to these questions before you move on...
Licensing Models
You can license the whole mess as one big slab of source code, or maybe a bunch of loadable modules and just open source the "glue". If you open source the glue, the customers can make major changes to your application without having the source code... Look at the PDFLib libraries. They are very powerful, cross platform, and completely closed source. Can't you do the same thing? Maybe build all of your business rules into a collection of libraries and make them binary only? Then wrap them with a license key or even a hardware dongle if desired. There are severalsoftwarevendorsthat do this for a living. Talk to them.
SAAS
If your core codebase is really "all that", why don't you look at a three-tier model? Your customers can host their own web server and database, and pay for a leased line back to your office for the business rules. There are many variations on this theme.
Other Options
You could open-source your code and copyright it so that only you could release software under the current name. Depending on whether your revenue model makes more money out of service or sales, this might actually be a viable option.
You could offer a turn-key "vendor supplied" package consisting of a pre-loaded server and hard-lock your software to that server. Sort of a Google Appliance for your app model. This way you can retain control of the platform and the customer can have your platform on their site.
First, thank you for this information. I've been looking at a solution like this, but hadn't realized that the Sun support contract would cover *everything* in the solution, which is a huge plus in my book.
I've been following ZFS for the last few months (since the November slashdot post about the open source release) and am very impressed with its' capabilities. That, combined with the binary-ready build of AFS on Solaris, and this is a very attractive solution that I'll look into.
Talk to a Sun sales rep - the above config Lists (i.e. prices from SunStore) at under $100k, and I'd expect you should be able to get it for considerably less. Remember - that cost includes 3 years of full support for everything.
Do you have someone in mind, or should I just call the Sun 800 number?
You mentioned needing a support contract. What happens if the system goes down? Does the company go out of business after a few hours of downtime? How about a day?
No, but we are out some money. We could probably survive one days outage, and our existing NetApp FAS250 has next-day service on it. I'm happy with the NetApp, but want to do my homework on this next storage device just like I did three years ago.
Looks like there is enough advice on vendors and hardware specs... the only thing I'd add is that SATA is NOT reliable enough for this purpose unless you're comfortable replacing a drive or two every month or so (don't do SATA RAID 5; try RAID 1 or 10... see WikiPedia:RAID [wikipedia.org] for more).... Use SCSI despite the price hit. SATA in stripes (a la RAID 10) will partially compensate for the RPM hit.
I'm looking at SATA simply for the price per GB. Anything I get will have a minimum of RAID 5 with a hot spare or possibly RAID 6 if I can find such a critter. I'm not opposed to doing SCSI all the way around, but it does make for a more expensive storage device when about 75% of our data is archival storage that rarely changes.
Oh, and get redundant power and a battery backup (UPS). If you can get an on-board battery for your hardware RAID card, do it.
We have a Liebert UPS (dual-refrigerator) in the basement with a backup diesel generator. We're covered for around 24 hours without gasoline, and indefinitely with gasoline.
The file server and ALL systems connected to it must have synchronized time.
NTP is configured on all servers, routers, printers, and any other device I can connect. Kerberos doesn't work well with time slips.:)
Also, be sure it's on a gigabit ethernet, hosts only a VERY minimal number of services, and is completely locked down from the internet... not even SSH should be visible; force administration to go through a bastion machine first.
Definitely a good common-sense statement. All of our internal servers are completely isolated from the internet with the exception of a couple of web servers, and FTP server, and some EDI ports to our AS400. Beyond that, all access goes through a SonicWall Pro 330.
Keep the thing updated, and set auto-updates to do dry-runs and email you what they could do. I have my Debian box set up to apt-get update; apt-get -y --download-only upgrade; apt-get -qq -s upgrade |mail -s "Updates for `hostname`" root every night (note, that's a hasty summarization; I actually have a nice shell script for that... ask me and I'll post it online for you... ideally, this should be a part of the daily logwatch output and only a seperate email when there are security updates).
Yes, please post it or email it to e-r-i-c-a-t-i-j-a-c-k-d-o-t-n-e-t. I've got a dozen or so Debian servers that could benefit from it regardless of the new storage box. Thanks in advance.
Lock down the file server. NOBODY but an admin doing admin work should even have the ability to log into it, for any reason. If there is such a need, make a nice little dummy machine that mounts the network shares and give them access to that.
There are only 3 admins (myself included) that will ever get into the box. All other users access through CIFS/NFS only, no shell access.
In over your head yet? Get a NetApp. They're the Apple of the NAS/SAN world; their products just work.
Not so much in over my head, just trying to cover all my bases. We have a NetApp FAS250 now and it's served us reliably over the last 3 years with a half-dozen or so failed drives and some locking issues. Our support contract has a new drive in my hands the following day, and the locking issue seems like a bug in the OnTap OS, but it's a relatively easy fix and I only run into it a couple of times per year. All in all, we might just end up buying another NetApp, but I can't justify spending another $75K without seeing some alternatives.
Everything except OS boot partitions. I want all of our data to reside on this solution. We have a large Oracle database, a few smaller SQL databases, lotus notes databases, Maildir folders, web site folders, and a few terabytes of artwork, cad drawings, and office documents. This means that I will have both clients and servers of all three stated platforms accessing the community storage.
I'm not looking for a *cheap* solution, per se, although price will be factored into the decision. What I'm looking for is a comprehensive storage solution that we can easily grow, maintain, and have rock solid uptime and performance.
When you're editing the properties of a session, you can check the "Logon script" box and choose a logon script to use for that session. You can do that either per-session, or as a global setting so it happens for all of your sessions.
Your logon script can contain as many aliases as you'd like.
I started writing an application in C++ a few months ago. I have similar goals, specifically stability and data integrity. Obviously the language doesn't really help with those two goals, but a strong flexible design combined with a large test-case framework is a good place to start.
As for the middleware, I've been looking at the Ice middleware library from ZeroC. It can be commercially licensed for closed-source development, or used freely in an open-source project.
From the documentation, their protocol looks like it's very well designed, and very full-featured. I also like their grid, proxy, and batch capabilities. All in all, Ice looks much better than CORBA and far easier than trying to roll my own middleware.
Does anyone reading Slashdot have any hands-on experience with Ice? I'd appreciate any comments/advice/email you care to share on this topic.
The problem with tape drives isn't really the technology, it's the price. The tape drive you're talking about retails for over $1,000, and you then have to purchase $85 tapes for it.
Taking that into account, you're looking at buying over 50TB of storage capacity before you even come close to breaking even. It just doesn't make sense to go with tape given the cost of disk right now.
I've been using IntelliJ for over a year now. Trust me when I tell you that it is by far the most productive IDE I've ever used. There's not even a question between the two. Spend the money on IntelliJ and you won't be sorry.
Re:I think "sharp" is not too appropriate...
on
Demise of C++?
·
· Score: 1
Wow, some actual bullet points. From an AC no less. And just one personal attack. I'm impressed.
algebraic syntax: SQL completely hides the underlying algebra. Can you imagine doing math without math operators? How you can you do relational algebra without relational operators?
While SQL does hide *some* of the underlying algebra, it exposes many of the operations such as UNION, INTERSECTion, subtraction (MINUS in Oracle), etc. Set division is probably the biggest missing keyword in SQL, but can be accomplished through a combination of SQL terms (JOIN... WHERE...), so in that sense, SQL fits the algebraic model.
non-table-oriented storage: why do SQL databases insist on physically storing data grouped in tables? This makes joins expensive. It should be just as efficient to join columns from 20 tables as it is to use one table with 20 attributes. The designers of SQL clearly didn't understand the RM either.
Tables were born out of the spreadsheet concepts where you have rows and columns of data. Tables do fit the relational model in that you have groups of attributes (columns) in a collection (rows). Tables are simply an easy concept for people to grasp and they work. If you don't like tables, you can use other techniques to store data. Look at Oracle's object extensions. Define an object then store those objects and query them. It's very natural to use and doesn't preclude either the relational model nor SQL syntax.
Secondly, joins are not expensive when using indices properly. As a matter of fact, bimapped indices can perform joins (or unions or intersections etc) with *very* little CPU or disk overhead. Indices are a technology to keep speed up when performing operations on large data sets, something the "relational model" doesn't specify. You need to realize that the relational model is really a definition of "what" needs to be accomplished, not the "how" it gets accomplished.
updateable views: the RM says base relations and derived relations (views) should be indistinguishable. Most SQL implementations don't allow for arbitrarily update-able views. How do you abstract or encapsulate in your database? How do you support two different apps that require two different schemas or column names? You can't, easily. Imagine a programming language without functions/subroutines/methods. Pretty useless, right?
Just because most SQL implementations don't allow for updateable views doesn't mean the SQL standard is flawed. Oracle provides full support for updatable views where it can relate the update to a single row, and you can override that behavior when the update is ambiguous with a set of rules to process the update. SQL Server has the same features I believe.
user-defined types: isn't it strange that programmers use something called an "ORM" that constantly assembles and disassembles composite types? Why can't I store the composite type right in the attribute, like the RM says I should?
You absolutely can store composite types right in the attribute. There's nothing in the majority of SQL engines that stop you from doing that. The reason for the disassembly of composite types is twofold; First, you'll get better speed when doing *other* things with the data if the data is broken down into its simplest form, and Second, it takes less room on disk when storing properly normalized data than just BLOBing the whole mess to disk.
The Relational Model is this ideal that means different things to different people and there are some solid database engines that implement many of the concepts of the relational model, but saying that there's no database vendor out there that supports the relational model in any way is pure FUD.
I will have to check out Dataphor. It seems like a good idea, but I suspect it's plagued by many of the problems that have been solved in the RDBMS world such as scalability, recoverability, etc. Basically all th
Codd is rolling in his grave. 30+ years since he developed the relational model, and still nobody's bothered implementing it.
Yet another post on this same topic by a troll.
What the fuck do you want implemented that todays RDBMS don't do? Give me a bulleted list of features that you want added or changed to existing implementations.
I've seen so much bitching and whining that "nobody makes a true relational database", but nobody states what the difference is between an existing database and a "true" database.
Fork over some named features or shut the fuck up.
IANAEE (Electrical Engineer) but I've taken a few courses in college. Isn't there a feature of some DC power supplies that regulates the power output to a specific mA rating? Many devices require regulated power, right? If that's the case, how do you distribute 12V to 10 devices when each device requires a different mA rating?
I know that "many devices" will only use the amount of power that they need, but there are many devices that will stop working or not charge at all when the input power isn't from the *exact* adapter.
Slashdot Mirror
I went to Best Buy and bought a new cable modem before I went over to a clients' house to work on an "internet is broken" problem. Turns out the router just wasn't plugged in.
Anyway, the cable modem sat in my truck for a few days (a week maybe?), and it got quite hot a few days that week. When I took the cable modem back to Best Buy to return it, the thermal receipt was wholly blank. Best Buy would only return it for in-store credit since I "didn't have my receipt". I know it was partly my fault for leaving it in the truck, but I had the Best Buy bag, the cable modem still in shrink-wrapped plastic, and a piece of paper that looked like a valid receipt.
Fuckers.
It looks like you're trying to find a "better way" to store these vast libraries of CD and DVD materials rather than rolling your own. You should contact a company that builds multi-tier racking for books, cd's tapes, x-rays, etc. The companies that make x-ray film libraries in the US do the same thing for other media types as well.
Good luck.
The answer is "Just be happy with what you've got."
The flushing of all the chemicals in your system will help loads. The extra sleep will give you energy through the dull test, and the OJ will give you a morning brain-kick. All natural even.
Good luck and have fun!
And from the article:
So either the poster or SCO itself isn't firing on all cylinders?
Writing a FS filter requires the IFSKit, which is expensive and does not come with an MSDN license.
Just so you know, Microsoft dropped the price for the IFS kit from over $1000 to less than $150 including shipping ($25 for shipping a CD... wowza!) a few months ago. You can purchase it online at the IFS kit page. That's a much easier pill to swallow for a PhD investment.
...without Rock, Paper, Saddam. :)
First, let's get the slashdot mentality out of the way.
There. That's a little better.
Two Distinctly Different Problems
Your question has an unstated assumption that might be steering you in the wrong direction. You assumed that you have to release your source code. You might not have to do that...
Application Layers
In the theoretical world, a web application has the following components:
Given these layers, what are you willing to open up? The web server is probably already open source or an off-the-shelf purchased product. Same with the back-end storage system. This leaves the presentation layer and the business rules layer. What are your top-tier customers going to do to your application? Change the way it looks, change the way it behaves, or add missing functionality? You need to know the answers to these questions before you move on...
Licensing Models
You can license the whole mess as one big slab of source code, or maybe a bunch of loadable modules and just open source the "glue". If you open source the glue, the customers can make major changes to your application without having the source code... Look at the PDFLib libraries. They are very powerful, cross platform, and completely closed source. Can't you do the same thing? Maybe build all of your business rules into a collection of libraries and make them binary only? Then wrap them with a license key or even a hardware dongle if desired. There are several software vendors that do this for a living. Talk to them.
SAAS
If your core codebase is really "all that", why don't you look at a three-tier model? Your customers can host their own web server and database, and pay for a leased line back to your office for the business rules. There are many variations on this theme.
Other Options
You could open-source your code and copyright it so that only you could release software under the current name. Depending on whether your revenue model makes more money out of service or sales, this might actually be a viable option.
You could offer a turn-key "vendor supplied" package consisting of a pre-loaded server and hard-lock your software to that server. Sort of a Google Appliance for your app model. This way you can retain control of the platform and the customer can have your platform on their site.
First, thank you for this information. I've been looking at a solution like this, but hadn't realized that the Sun support contract would cover *everything* in the solution, which is a huge plus in my book.
I've been following ZFS for the last few months (since the November slashdot post about the open source release) and am very impressed with its' capabilities. That, combined with the binary-ready build of AFS on Solaris, and this is a very attractive solution that I'll look into.
Talk to a Sun sales rep - the above config Lists (i.e. prices from SunStore) at under $100k, and I'd expect you should be able to get it for considerably less. Remember - that cost includes 3 years of full support for everything.
Do you have someone in mind, or should I just call the Sun 800 number?
Thanks for taking the time to respond!
... the only thing I'd add is that SATA is NOT reliable enough for this purpose unless you're comfortable replacing a drive or two every month or so (don't do SATA RAID 5; try RAID 1 or 10 ... see WikiPedia:RAID [wikipedia.org] for more). ... Use SCSI despite the price hit. SATA in stripes (a la RAID 10) will partially compensate for the RPM hit.
:)
... not even SSH should be visible; force administration to go through a bastion machine first.
... ask me and I'll post it online for you ... ideally, this should be a part of the daily logwatch output and only a seperate email when there are security updates).
You mentioned needing a support contract. What happens if the system goes down? Does the company go out of business after a few hours of downtime? How about a day?
No, but we are out some money. We could probably survive one days outage, and our existing NetApp FAS250 has next-day service on it. I'm happy with the NetApp, but want to do my homework on this next storage device just like I did three years ago.
Looks like there is enough advice on vendors and hardware specs
I'm looking at SATA simply for the price per GB. Anything I get will have a minimum of RAID 5 with a hot spare or possibly RAID 6 if I can find such a critter. I'm not opposed to doing SCSI all the way around, but it does make for a more expensive storage device when about 75% of our data is archival storage that rarely changes.
Oh, and get redundant power and a battery backup (UPS). If you can get an on-board battery for your hardware RAID card, do it.
We have a Liebert UPS (dual-refrigerator) in the basement with a backup diesel generator. We're covered for around 24 hours without gasoline, and indefinitely with gasoline.
The file server and ALL systems connected to it must have synchronized time.
NTP is configured on all servers, routers, printers, and any other device I can connect. Kerberos doesn't work well with time slips.
Also, be sure it's on a gigabit ethernet, hosts only a VERY minimal number of services, and is completely locked down from the internet
Definitely a good common-sense statement. All of our internal servers are completely isolated from the internet with the exception of a couple of web servers, and FTP server, and some EDI ports to our AS400. Beyond that, all access goes through a SonicWall Pro 330.
Keep the thing updated, and set auto-updates to do dry-runs and email you what they could do. I have my Debian box set up to apt-get update; apt-get -y --download-only upgrade; apt-get -qq -s upgrade |mail -s "Updates for `hostname`" root every night (note, that's a hasty summarization; I actually have a nice shell script for that
Yes, please post it or email it to e-r-i-c-a-t-i-j-a-c-k-d-o-t-n-e-t. I've got a dozen or so Debian servers that could benefit from it regardless of the new storage box. Thanks in advance.
Lock down the file server. NOBODY but an admin doing admin work should even have the ability to log into it, for any reason. If there is such a need, make a nice little dummy machine that mounts the network shares and give them access to that.
There are only 3 admins (myself included) that will ever get into the box. All other users access through CIFS/NFS only, no shell access.
In over your head yet? Get a NetApp. They're the Apple of the NAS/SAN world; their products just work.
Not so much in over my head, just trying to cover all my bases. We have a NetApp FAS250 now and it's served us reliably over the last 3 years with a half-dozen or so failed drives and some locking issues. Our support contract has a new drive in my hands the following day, and the locking issue seems like a bug in the OnTap OS, but it's a relatively easy fix and I only run into it a couple of times per year. All in all, we might just end up buying another NetApp, but I can't justify spending another $75K without seeing some alternatives.
Everything except OS boot partitions. I want all of our data to reside on this solution. We have a large Oracle database, a few smaller SQL databases, lotus notes databases, Maildir folders, web site folders, and a few terabytes of artwork, cad drawings, and office documents. This means that I will have both clients and servers of all three stated platforms accessing the community storage.
I'm not looking for a *cheap* solution, per se, although price will be factored into the decision. What I'm looking for is a comprehensive storage solution that we can easily grow, maintain, and have rock solid uptime and performance.
The oXygen XML editor is as capable as XMLSpy, but costs considerably less at $180 or $230 with maintenance and is fully cross-platform.
I know it's not free, but for the price, it's an excellent tool.
I use SecureCRT on a daily basis.
When you're editing the properties of a session, you can check the "Logon script" box and choose a logon script to use for that session. You can do that either per-session, or as a global setting so it happens for all of your sessions.
Your logon script can contain as many aliases as you'd like.
I started writing an application in C++ a few months ago. I have similar goals, specifically stability and data integrity. Obviously the language doesn't really help with those two goals, but a strong flexible design combined with a large test-case framework is a good place to start.
As for the middleware, I've been looking at the Ice middleware library from ZeroC. It can be commercially licensed for closed-source development, or used freely in an open-source project.
From the documentation, their protocol looks like it's very well designed, and very full-featured. I also like their grid, proxy, and batch capabilities. All in all, Ice looks much better than CORBA and far easier than trying to roll my own middleware.
Does anyone reading Slashdot have any hands-on experience with Ice? I'd appreciate any comments/advice/email you care to share on this topic.
Just trying to fit in. :)
Can someone tell me what a "movelist" is?
Pause...
Oh, right... novelists.
F7 baby, F7.
The problem with tape drives isn't really the technology, it's the price. The tape drive you're talking about retails for over $1,000, and you then have to purchase $85 tapes for it.
If you look on CDW for a 250GB Western Digital hard drive, you'll find them for around $130.
Taking that into account, you're looking at buying over 50TB of storage capacity before you even come close to breaking even. It just doesn't make sense to go with tape given the cost of disk right now.
I've been using IntelliJ for over a year now. Trust me when I tell you that it is by far the most productive IDE I've ever used. There's not even a question between the two. Spend the money on IntelliJ and you won't be sorry.
You're both octothorpes.
Wow, some actual bullet points. From an AC no less. And just one personal attack. I'm impressed.
While SQL does hide *some* of the underlying algebra, it exposes many of the operations such as UNION, INTERSECTion, subtraction (MINUS in Oracle), etc. Set division is probably the biggest missing keyword in SQL, but can be accomplished through a combination of SQL terms (JOIN ... WHERE ...), so in that sense, SQL fits the algebraic model.
Tables were born out of the spreadsheet concepts where you have rows and columns of data. Tables do fit the relational model in that you have groups of attributes (columns) in a collection (rows). Tables are simply an easy concept for people to grasp and they work. If you don't like tables, you can use other techniques to store data. Look at Oracle's object extensions. Define an object then store those objects and query them. It's very natural to use and doesn't preclude either the relational model nor SQL syntax.
Secondly, joins are not expensive when using indices properly. As a matter of fact, bimapped indices can perform joins (or unions or intersections etc) with *very* little CPU or disk overhead. Indices are a technology to keep speed up when performing operations on large data sets, something the "relational model" doesn't specify. You need to realize that the relational model is really a definition of "what" needs to be accomplished, not the "how" it gets accomplished.
Just because most SQL implementations don't allow for updateable views doesn't mean the SQL standard is flawed. Oracle provides full support for updatable views where it can relate the update to a single row, and you can override that behavior when the update is ambiguous with a set of rules to process the update. SQL Server has the same features I believe.
You absolutely can store composite types right in the attribute. There's nothing in the majority of SQL engines that stop you from doing that. The reason for the disassembly of composite types is twofold; First, you'll get better speed when doing *other* things with the data if the data is broken down into its simplest form, and Second, it takes less room on disk when storing properly normalized data than just BLOBing the whole mess to disk.
The Relational Model is this ideal that means different things to different people and there are some solid database engines that implement many of the concepts of the relational model, but saying that there's no database vendor out there that supports the relational model in any way is pure FUD.
I will have to check out Dataphor. It seems like a good idea, but I suspect it's plagued by many of the problems that have been solved in the RDBMS world such as scalability, recoverability, etc. Basically all th
Codd is rolling in his grave. 30+ years since he developed the relational model, and still nobody's bothered implementing it.
Yet another post on this same topic by a troll.
What the fuck do you want implemented that todays RDBMS don't do? Give me a bulleted list of features that you want added or changed to existing implementations.
I've seen so much bitching and whining that "nobody makes a true relational database", but nobody states what the difference is between an existing database and a "true" database.
Fork over some named features or shut the fuck up.
IANAEE (Electrical Engineer) but I've taken a few courses in college. Isn't there a feature of some DC power supplies that regulates the power output to a specific mA rating? Many devices require regulated power, right? If that's the case, how do you distribute 12V to 10 devices when each device requires a different mA rating?
I know that "many devices" will only use the amount of power that they need, but there are many devices that will stop working or not charge at all when the input power isn't from the *exact* adapter.
Right?
Looks like BSD lives to die another day :)
If I had mod points, you'd get 'em. I've been using this technique for several years now and it works flawlessly.