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From: bsa@telotech.UUCP (Brandon S. Allbery)
Newsgroups: comp.databases
Subject: Re: Extended RDB vs OODB
Message-ID: <1989Aug28.010536.24940@telotech.uucp>
Date: 28 Aug 89 01:05:36 GMT
References: <3560052@wdl1.UUCP> <408@odi.ODI.COM> <3324@rtech.rtech.com> <1989Aug11.143036.24703@odi.com> <1765@ethz.UUCP> <5259@wiley.UUCP> <1989Aug17.211534.28345@odi.com>
Reply-To: bsa@telotech.UUCP (Brandon S. Allbery)
Organization: _
	      telotech, inc. - Beachwood, OH
Lines: 35
In-reply-to: jack@odi.com (Jack Orenstein)

In article <1989Aug17.211534.28345@odi.com>, jack@odi (Jack Orenstein) writes:
+---------------
| The two-language paradigm of RDBMSs complicates the writing of
| applications, and has performance consequences as well.  This is a
| problem with implementations of the relational model, and not inherent
| in the relational model. OO DBMSs avoid these problems by offering a
| single language in which to write applications, pushing the
| responsibility for database access into the system, away from the
| user.
+---------------

Which raises the possibility that a version of C could be written that would
be able to treat transient and persistent RDBMS data in the same way.  Heck,
I'm actually *doing* this, after a fashion -- a certain program I've been
working on wants to be able to select data from various "tables" (not in an
RDBMS, actually, but they can be collectively treated as an RDBMS without
indexes), and I'm writing a selection language which is somewhat C-like.  (Not
complete C, because it's not needed for what I'm doing in this case.  Even in
existing systems this could be precompiled into mixed C and SQL code.

BTW, what exactly do you mean by your assertion that a pointer to persistent
data need not be declared differently from transient data?  The program needs
to be notified of the association between a particular data type and/or an
instance of that data type and an external data store *somehow*.  I can see
two such instances (variables) being declared the same way, but one of them
will have *some* operation done on it which will associate it with an external
object, thus effecting a "dynamic" change in definition.  Also, what does that
operation look like (in the code)?

++Brandon (RDBMS hacker -- but I truly want to know about OODB's)
-- 
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