Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!dev!jkrueger
From: jkrueger@dev.dtic.dla.mil (Jonathan Krueger)
Newsgroups: comp.databases
Subject: Re: Intelligent Databases (was Re: DB Procedures)
Message-ID: <3584@dev.dtic.dla.mil>
Date: 6 Dec 89 01:54:02 GMT
References: <4198@rtech.rtech.com> <7323@sybase.sybase.com> <4220@rtech.rtech.com> <7335@sybase.sybase.com>
Organization: Defense Technical Information Center (DTIC), Alexandria VA
Lines: 45

tim@binky.sybase.com (Tim Wood) writes:

>Those aren't client/server architectures, those are RDBMS internal 
>archtitectures.

OK, first principles then: how do you define "architecture"?
For instance, would you accept Blaauw [1970]?

>ADTs ... are a nice piece of object-orientation in the DBMS.

Equally true the other way around.  And equally silly.
Each model has its merits.

>On the other hand, it
>might be more flexible in practice for the application to handle 
>the many arbitrary object types that a user could create.  Many 
>abstract operations might be sufficiently handled in the presentation-level
>stuff running on the client.  Why burden the DBMS with these functions,
>especially if they are CPU intensive? 

Because it's demonstrably unsafe to do so, it doesn't support
distributing the load, and it makes many query optimizations
impossible.  Your company makes quite a deal out of the first
reason, with respect to integrities: why should we expect less
of domain integrity?

>Then you could be stealing server
>cycles from bread-and-butter transactions.

One buys a server to execute one's database engine.  It needs
what it needs.  If one's data types are expensive, it needs more.

>I'm just not sure if ADT's 
>are closer to the front-end processing than to the data management, and
>more of a decision-support feature.  

Neither: they're one's data.  Consider arbitrarily large fixed point,
for instance.  Expensive to implement regardless of where you put it.
Now, what would its use be?

-- Jon
-- 
Jonathan Krueger    jkrueger@dgis.daitc.mil   uunet!dgis!jkrueger
Isn't it interesting that the first thing you do with your
color bitmapped window system on a network is emulate an ASR33?