Re: Windows Ada database support.

["Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de>]

On Tue, 7 Dec 2004 15:49:36 +0000 (UTC), Georg Bauhaus wrote:

> Dmitry A. Kazakov <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de> wrote:
> 
>: I think that this is a shortcoming of the very concept of a relational
>: view. Relation is not an array. Period.
> 
> Who says that a relation is an array?

Nobody. The problem is that we need arrays, or more generally, ordered
containers. This is the way the most people think about tables. They do not
think about them in terms of relations. Yes, a relational view is complete
and you can express everything in it. But it is too low level. This is why
people keep on inventing ways to mark that damned rows. Nothing is wrong
with that, but the result is, as Warren has pointed out, utter chaos.

>: Also we should distinguish two cases:
>: 
>: A. Some Ada application stores its data in a database. The way the data are
>: organized there is free.
>: 
>: B. Accessing existing (but unknown at design time) data base. The data
>: structure is fixed and the application must adapt to it.
>: 
>: A is much easier than B.
> 
> Wow. I wonder what kind of trivial or specialized applications you have in
> mind.

Very trivial. I have data, I need to organize and store them.

> General purpose databases, of whatever flavor, are complex beasts,
> no matter what.

Why an application that need to store data, should care about that? Sorry,
I still cannot understand it. Do you care much about ferromagnetism when
you write a file onto the hard drive?

> A lot has been written about databases, many solutions
> have been tried, a lot of research is going on. No use ignoring all of
> it.

Oh, I welcome research, but yes, I keep on trying to ignore that. (:-))

> So far I think you are just repeating the *questions* that have
> accompanied the huge database efforts.

Maybe.

-- 
Regards,
Dmitry A. Kazakov
http://www.dmitry-kazakov.de