Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cwjcc!gatech!mcnc!rti!ntpdvp1!tomg
From: tomg@ntpdvp1.UUCP (Thomas Groot)
Newsgroups: comp.databases
Subject: Re: Relational Model (Was Re: Oracle: Previous Record)
Summary: Our users seem to think in hierarchical terms
Message-ID: <158@ntpdvp1.UUCP>
Date: 21 Jul 89 13:07:55 GMT
References: <AYknCfy00WB28IU6sk@andrew.cmu.edu> <18886@sequent.UUCP>
Organization: Northern Telecom DMS-10 Div., Raleigh, NC
Lines: 26


    The group I'm in writes database applications for various tasks
    on the factory floor.  We've been at it for three or four years,
    using both hierarchical and relational database engines.     My
    experience is that our users (high-school and college-educated)
    tend to think in hierarchical terms:  they see a single, sequential
    set of data which they step forward and backward through.  With
    our most recent work in relational systems, it seems we end up
    writing hierarchical interfaces to relational data models.
    Maybe this is poor design on our part, but our customers are
    happy. ;-)   I would have a hard time explaining to some of
    them how to view data in a relational manner.

    In a recent evaluation we did of Oracle, one of our main problems
    with their tools was lack of support for previous record retrieval.
    Our customers expect to do previous record retrieval, even though
    most of our application internals are relational. 

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