Thursday, August 25, 2022

NOTHING TO DO WITH RELATIONAL (t&n)



Note: "Then & Now" (T&N) is a new version of what used to be the "Oldies but Goodies" (OBG) series. To demonstrate the superiority of a sound theoretical foundation relative to the industry's fad-driven "cookbook" practices, as well as the evolution/progress of RDM, I am re-visiting my 2000-06 debunkings, bringing them up to my with my knowledge and understanding of today. This will enable you to judge how well my arguments have held up and appreciate the increasing gap between scientific progress and the industry’s stagnation, if not outright regress.

This was an email exchange with a reader, first published as ON ON-THE-FLY THINKING in March 2005.

“From a quick one-page marketing article:
"Relational databases are one to two orders of magnitude too slow."
--Michael Stonebreaker, quoted in Data on the Fly, Forbes
The quote is directly from the company's owner who "...created two well-known relational database systems, Ingres and Postgres." Further from the reporter:
"Unlike traditional database programs, Streambase analyzes data without storing it to disk, performing queries on data as it flows."
Hmmm... didn't know that the Relational Model of Data specifically proscribed in-memory implementations.”

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

SUPPORT THIS SITE
DBDebunk was maintained and kept free with the proceeds from my @AllAnalitics column. The site was discontinued in 2018. The content here is not available anywhere else, so if you deem it useful, particularly if you are a regular reader, please help upkeep it by purchasing publications, or donating. On-site seminars and consulting are available.Thank you.

LATEST POSTS

08/20 DATABASE RELATIONS, DATABASE DESIGN & CORRECTNESS (sms)

08/14 THE VOCIFEROUS IGNORANCE HALL OF SHAME (t&n)

08/04 DATABASE RELATIONS, TABLES AND SEMANTIC CONSISTENCY

UPDATES

08/20 Added Logic and databases course to LINKS page.

LATEST PUBLICATIONS (order from PAPERS and BOOKS pages)
- 08/19 Logical Symmetric Access, Data Sub-language, Kinds of Relations, Database Redundancy and Consistency, paper #2 in the new UNDERSTANDING THE REAL RDM series.
- 02/18 The Key to Relational Keys: A New Understanding, a new edition of paper #4 in the PRACTICAL DATABASE FOUNDATIONS series.
- 04/17 Interpretation and Representation of Database Relations, paper #1 in the new UNDERSTANDING THE REAL RDM series.
- 10/16 THE DBDEBUNK GUIDE TO MISCONCEPTIONS ABOUT DATA FUNDAMENTALS, my latest book (reviewed by Craig Mullins, Todd Everett, Toon Koppelaars, Davide Mauri).

USING THIS SITE
- To work around Blogger limitations, the labels are mostly abbreviations or acronyms of the terms listed on the
FUNDAMENTALS page. For detailed instructions on how to understand and use the labels in conjunction with that page, see the ABOUT page. The 2017 and 2016 posts, including earlier posts rewritten in 2017 were relabeled accordingly. As other older posts are rewritten, they will also be relabeled. For all other older posts use Blogger search.
- The links to my AllAnalytics columns no longer work. I re-published only the 2017 columns @dbdebunk, and within them links to sources external to AllAnalytics may or may not work.

SOCIAL MEDIA
I deleted my Facebook account. You can follow me @DBDdebunk on Twitter: will link to new posts to this site, as well as To Laugh or Cry? and What's Wrong with This Picture? posts, and my exchanges on LinkedIn.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

My Response Then...

Nothing new [and quite typical] from those who design SQL DBMSs, then turn around and criticize them as RDBMSs that perform badly and develop other non-RDBMSs that purportedly perform better, implying that it's because they are not relational. In reality, performance has nothing to do with RDM and everything to do with implementation. Nothing prevented them from building in-memory true RDBMSs.

The reporter should have asked Informix/IBM whatever happened to Illustra, the product that Stonebraker was pushing before Streambase with similar rhetoric. Beware of academics with business interests.

... and Now

Stonebraker is the recipient of the 2014 Turing award and he developed several other commercial products since then. He certainly knew better than expressing his views the way he did. Had he not been a vendor, he would have probably refrained from misleading by referring to SQL DBMSs as relational and implying that RDBMSs are inherently slow, particularly as the author of Ingres that sported QUEL, a query language relationally superior to SQL.

He could have, for example, said:
“Current SQL DBMSs are way too slow. But performance has nothing to do with their being relational (which in fact they are not) -- it is determined exclusively by implementation and one way in which it can be improved for any DBMS, including SQL and truly relational, is an in-memory implementation.”

Note: Of course, at that time the McGoveran interpretation of the RDM -- his re-interpretation of Codd's work was not known -- so even had SQL been properly designed, it would still not be considered such today, given the new understanding.




No comments:

Post a Comment

View My Stats