On Tuesday 2006-06-13 09:26, David Fetter wrote: > On Tue, Jun 13, 2006 at 09:18:17AM -0600, Scott Ribe wrote: > > > What say we just stop right there and call Date's Relational Model > > > what it is: a silly edifice built atop wrong premises. > > > > SQL was a quick and dirty hack (Systems R and R* needed some way to > > interface with data) with multiple deficiencies recognized and > > documented right within the very first paper by its own authors. > > Perfection isn't a human attribute. There isn't a whole lot of > convincing evidence that it's a divine attribute. Did you have a > point to make? > > > To hold it up as any kind of paradigm is really misinformed. > > SQL had something that relational algebra/relational calculus did not > have, which is that somebody without a math degree can stare at it a > short while and *do* something with it right away. That it also has > other properties that are extremely useful and powerful (the ability > to specify states of ignorance using NULL, do arithmetic, use > aggregates, etc.) is what has made it such a smashing success. > > Now, there's another thing that makes it amazingly hard to displace: > imagining what would be better *enough* to justify the many millions > of people-years and even more billions of dollars needed to move away > from it. Despite Date's many whines over the decades, his > still-vaporware Relational Model doesn't even vaguely approximate that > criterion. > > Cheers, > D COBOL and VisualBasic are better than Haskell by the same argument. (SQL always reminds me a lot of COBOL.)
