On Thu, 5 May 2005, Simon Perreault wrote:
... ok, now that we got the argument "this is data" out of our way, let's focus on why one would want to put a particular kind of data in a DBMS or not. The whole purpose of a DBMS is *quick retrieval*. That's it. Otherwise, you might just as well use flat unindexed files.
No, that's completely wrong. The purpose of putting something in a DBMS is to ensure _correctness_ of the data, and to make it easier to query that data in a variety of ways, particularly in ways you did not anticipate when you first created the logical model. Speed may or may not be a nice bonus. A good DBMS has many features that help ensure the logical correctness of the data, and a good logical model lets you do a variety of queries on what you've stored.
If speed is all you're after then a SQL DBMS is almost certainly not the right choice.
-dave
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