Re: OO's best feature survey results

From: JXStern (JXSternChangeX2R_at_gte.net)
Date: 11/01/03 

Date: Sat, 01 Nov 2003 15:44:35 GMT

On 1 Nov 2003 01:09:27 -0800, topmind@technologist.com (Topmind)
wrote:
>> Relational is good because it gives you very nearly the mechanical,
>> meat-grinder approach to modelling that everyone wants, at least down
>> to 3NF. However, there are entire classes of apps that don't model
>> very well to relational.
>
>It would be interesting to catalog the alleged failings. Are
>they perfomance failings or developer interaction failures?
>Note that relational theory does not define an implementation.
>Thus, a slow database just may mean that someone is not
>thinking of all the implementation options.

They've been cataloged numerous times, heck any serious book on
relational should list them. Well let me see ... heck, it's early and
I'm lazy, and this one old book by Date only mentions the "parts
explosion" (hierarchical bill of materials) shortcoming, the other
classic areas are temporal and geometric/spatial. Oracle added,
what's it called, that parent-of operator, to address the BOM issue,
other extensions have been added to address time-series temporal data,
full support for temporal and spatial datatypes have been proposed
many times. I'm not sure what's in any new SQL standards, ... nor
what the heck the status of any new SQL standards are anyway.

>> So, one has tradeoffs. It's still a good
>> step to do the relational data model first, and to understand what
>> leaving it in the RDBMS buys you -- generally, the vast majority of
>> your app other than the GUI.
>
>And, I think GUI's should be defined in meta-data of some sort,
>not app code. For one, that would divorce a GUI engine
>from being tied to any one programming language.

And many/most GUIs mostly are done as meta-data created by some GUI
layout utility, have been for a decade or two, but eventually you want
to hook code to them. Sure there are GUI-to-DB tools that have been
built and sold, but they soon grow little command languages, yada
yada.

J.

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