Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!csd4.milw.wisc.edu!bionet!ames!uhccux!munnari.oz.au!comp.vuw.ac.nz!dsiramd!csnz!paul From: paul@csnz.co.nz (Paul Gillingwater) Newsgroups: comp.databases Subject: Re: Relational Model (Was Re: Oracle: Previous Record) Summary: Relational does not model the real world Keywords: relational empirical support Message-ID: <81@csnz.co.nz> Date: 23 Jul 89 21:27:14 GMT References: <18886@sequent.UUCP> Reply-To: paul@csnz.co.nz (Paul Gillingwater) Organization: Computer Sciences of NZ Limited Lines: 40 In article <18886@sequent.UUCP> normb@sequent.UUCP (Norm Browne) writes: >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. > 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? > >this was one of the areas that I researched. I could find no substantiation >that the relational model _really_ represented real world applications. >Norm Browne Experience tends to confirm that the relational approach is not an accurate model for all real-world situations. I could present an empirical "proof", but I'm not well enough versed in formal logic to present a rigorous argument for this. ;-) It seems "intuitive" to me that an object-oriented OODBMS is better at mapping real world situations. Further, there are some cases where a relational approach is very limited, e.g. large text databases, where a record may contain from a few bytes to several megabytes. This is where software like BRS/Search, which indexes *every single word*, is very useful. Relational approaches have their place -- although the implementations sometimes lack efficiencies in dealing with diverse data sets -- but I would not reject the relational approach in all cases. IBM have done a lot of work with other models, e.g. CODASYL. Here's a good example of a database which doesn't fit well with the relational approach: The Bible! Yes, I have this working just fine under BRS/Search... less than three seconds to find any chosen verse, based on keyword searching. -- Paul Gillingwater, Computer Sciences of New Zealand Limited Bang: ..!uunet!dsiramd!csnz!paul Domain: paul@csnz.co.nz Call Magic Tower BBS V21/23/22/22bis 24 hrs +0064 4 767 326