> owner@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Eric Schwarzenbach > >> If I had a few $million to spend in a philanthropical manner, I would > >> hire some of the best PG devs to develop a proper relational database > server. > >> Probably a query language that expressed the relational algebra in a > >> scheme-like syntax, and the storage model would be properly > >> relational (eg no duplicate rows). If there were someone to pay the bills, would you work on it? > >> It's an enormous tragedy that all the development effort that has > >> gone into NoSQL database has pretty much all gotten it wrong: by all > >> means throw out SQL, but not the relational model with it. They're > >> all just rehashing the debate over hierarchical storage from the 70s. > >> Comp Sci courses should feature a history class. > >> > >> It's a bit odd to me that someone isn't working on such a thing. Several people are, but without the few $million... > > Well when IBM were first developing relational databases there were > > two different teams. One in California which produced System-R which > > became what we now know as DB2 and spawned SQL, and the other in > > Peterlee in the UK which was called PRTV (the Peterlee Relational Test > > Vehicle). PRTV rather died but bits of it survived. And many of the people who worked on it are still around. > > According to the Wikipedia page it did have a language (ISBL) but from > > what I recall (and it was nearly 40 years ago) there were a series of > > PL/1 function calls we used rather than encoding the request as a > > string as SQL systems require. Ditto. Including Hugh Darwen. > One of the people involved in that was Hugh Darwen, who is one of the authors > of The Third Manifesto, which is an attempt to define what a properly > relational language and system should look like. So you could say the > experience of ISBL vs SQL has been folded into that effort. See http://www.thethirdmanifesto.com/. Hugh worked for some years for IBM on the SQL Committee, but eventually left over a major disagreement in direction. TTM is based on the work he's done since (with Chris Date). Andl derives from that. I would say that very little of PRTV/ISBL experience was added to SQL once it had been standardised, even with Hugh doing his best. Regards David M Bennett FACS Andl - A New Database Language - andl.org -- Sent via pgsql-general mailing list (pgsql-general@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-general
