> a) real-world things > are almost always hierarchical compositions (due to our human way of > describing them)
you can store those in a relational schema. It seems to me that the problem is that sql doesn't really make it efficient to do heirarchical type things with them. I know some old data analysts who still bemoan the fact that sql won the day, given how poor it was at so many things, this being one of them. > b) real-world things keep changing (modiyfing the > schema of a database is a pain in the neck when you have 200m records > and 50 tables). so, you can move the deckchairs on the titanic; changing the schema of any system is painful. The actual conversion time is usually the least painful part of it. > Using relational in the classical way works for things > like tax and bank databases because the data are not 'real' things, but > tabular accounting constructs. oh? what's a real thing? I don't think these things are any less real than other things, just that the business environment dictated that IT requirements came first a thousand years ago. Grahame
