While working as the OS Product Manager for The Ultimate Corp. a team of us met with EF Codd, CJ Date and Dr. Nathan Goodman. The meeting was held at Ultimate's corporate headquarters in New Jersey and was at Ultimate's request. The purpose of the meeting was so that we could have an open discussion about the "relational model" and figure out how and if the Ultimate model fit in.
After the meeting, I spent the better part of a week one-on-one with Dr. Goodman (Senior Vice President of Codd and Date, Inc. at the time) to show him the database, the toolset, the implementations (Honeywell, VAX, IBM, LSI...), etc along with some application software. We went through each of the C&D Rules in detail. Ultimate had some features that made a difference in this review - one of which was Ultimate's Update. Not the update language developed by Pick Systems, but one that was developed by Chandru Murthi. It used the same dictionary sets to retrieve and update information using one "view" of the database. The Update language was built into the OS. You could "LIST CUSTOMERS NAME ADDRESS CITY STATE ZIP START.DATE OPEN.BALANCE", and also "UPDATE CUSTOMERS NAME ADDRESS CITY STATE ZIP START.DATE OPEN.BALANCE". Both update and retrieval used the same language, syntax, and dictionaries. Multivalues, index usage and updates, validations, referential integrity, no-nulls, etc were all handled automatically. It was a very interesting exchange. At the end of the exploration task, Dr. Goodman put together a presentation and in this presentation he concluded that: "This model is the best implementation of what the relational model tries to accomplish". Basically, the C&D Rules were intended as a guideline, not law, and C&D volunteered that they weren't perfect. It's was also interesting to find out that there are very few, if any, "relational" databases that meet all of the rules. Unfortunately, Ultimate's Sr. management changed shortly thereafter, and the new management decided not to pursue this track. IIRC, EF Codd also passed away soon after. So, the question is, "how do we compete" given the model that we have? And rather than arguing "relational or not", we should be helping define our model in positive terms. The Better & Better committee of U2UG has developed an application to help funnel ideas into the (now, Rocket Software) development hopper. There are a ton of good ideas, and as a group, we have an incredible opportunity to move our group forward. Thanks, Laura Hirsh _______________________________________________ U2-Users mailing list [email protected] http://listserver.u2ug.org/mailman/listinfo/u2-users
