Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!zephyr!tektronix!sequent!normb From: normb@sequent.UUCP (Norm Browne) Newsgroups: comp.databases Subject: Relational Model (Was Re: Oracle: Previous Record) Summary: How realistic is the relational model? Keywords: relational empirical support Message-ID: <18886@sequent.UUCP> Date: 18 Jul 89 21:27:12 GMT References: Reply-To: normb@sequent.UUCP (Norm Browne) Organization: CARLINOR - CA Refugees Living IN OR Lines: 35 In article bg0l+@andrew.cmu.edu (Bruce E. Golightly) writes: >There are indeed times when you can't think in terms of the relational >model. Sometimes the users insist that they want what they want, and you >can't do it without breaking the model. We had to write an application ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ >to do this kind of thing a while back. > [At the risk of being labeled a heretic in the contemporary dbms world. :-)] Does it strike anyone else that the above kind of statement indicates that the relational model is not a very accurate depiction of the real world? I concluded my graduate studies at Claremont Grad in I.S. last spring and this was one of the areas that I researched. I could find no substantiation that the relational model _really_ represented real world applications. Was my research simply incomplete? If so, please recommend some readings (conceptual modeling, semantic aspects of rdbms, etc.) that `prove' the ``realness'' of relational. (On the same line of thought what about the `intuitiveness' of the relational model, i.e. users more easily comprehend the relational approach than [hierarchical,network] dbms). If my failure to turn up any supporting evidence was not oversight, then why has no one bothered to work on the subject? BTW- I am not attacking relational per se (so cool the flamethrowers :-)), it just seems that the theory is lacking some empirical support. ---------------------------==========================-------------------------- Norm Browne "Mathematics has nothing to do with the real world." -Richard Pick ===========================--------------------------==========================