ON WHY NOT POINTERS

From: James Goulding

Date: 22 Sep 2005

First, may I congratulate you on the dbdebunk site - it is a great resource (and a free one at that). Also, extremely pleased with my (so far) single paper purchase. All good stuff indeed.

As a theoretician I am obviously an advocate of the relational model (although don't preclude there being room for improvement - the mathematics of utilising n-tuples for entity representation sits

slightly uneasily with me, as does the underlying assumption of complete information), and enjoy your columns - unfortunately an underlying sense of frustration also makes them extremely entertaining. I've worked a lot with Ted Nelson and Douglas Englebart and they show the same sort of exasperation with many areas of computer science - especially with XML in Ted's case.

Anyhow, I was hoping you might spare a couple of seconds for me - In a recent column for dbazine.com, No Database Champion you mentioned in reference Xpath, pointers and navigational databases:

Date has written a number of articles explaining the problems of using pointers rather than "values" to link related information.

I have exhausted my papers, book chapters and other literature, and scoured the web for references to these articles but have had no success (outside of interviews and soundbites), and wondered if you might be able to point in the direction of them.

From: Fabian Pascal

Glad you find the site useful.

Not sure what the problem is with the former (I am not a mathematician), but there is no assumption of complete information; the only limitation, which is inherent, is that inferences cannot be made from what is unknown. [See The Final NULL in the Coffin].

I express it as "don’t know whether to laugh or cry". There is very little computer science these days. In fact, science in general is going away. Everything is increasingly driven by industry and whatever stupid, ignorant ideas it comes up with.

See the following in RELATIONAL DATABASE SELECTED WRITINGS 1994-1997:

Don't Mix Pointers with Relations

Object Identifiers vs. Relational Keys

They have references sections.

Posted 12/03/05