Edward K. Ream wrote:
On Tue, Mar 26, 2013 at 1:34 PM, Terry Brown <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
Traditional SQL DBs are all about tables/records/fields and relating /
filtering them.
They use indexes (binary trees etc.) to extract subsets of information
very very fast, this is really the magic of decent RDBMSs, the way
they
cleverly decide which of several different strategies best suits the
extraction of a particular subset of data.
Interesting. This is the first time I have ever seen the word
"cleverly" used in connection with data bases. Every time I look at a
schema I think, what an incredibly stupid way to look at the world
:-) Perhaps somebody can explain to me why tables aren't brain dead.
The basic underlying principal of relational databases is that data can
be "normalized" into tables - which makes it a lot easier to organize,
store, and compute. Relationships are represented as tables with common
fields (keys), and so on. Turns out to very computationally efficient.
Now from a representational point of view, other kinds of databases can
be more useful - graph databases in particular (e.g., neo4J), object
oriented datbases, text databases, semantic databases (e.g., RDF
triplestores), but.... if you're munging huge amounts of data - be it
business transactions or sensor records, tables, a la RDBMS (or
spreadsheets) turn out to be both conceptually and computationally simple.
Miles Fidelman
--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra
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