Comments on advantages of the relational view

ABSTRACT

I will be drawing a lot of my material from the application programming paper by Chris Date and Ted Codd. It's an excellent paper and I suggest you read it. The major focus of my talk and most of the arguments I'll be presenting have to do with a certain divergence that I see at least between what all the other people in program methodology are trying to do and what the DBTG proposal represents. On one hand, those having anything to do with program methodology are trying to define very concise, high level constructs and discipline programming by cutting down freedom and richness in the programming language. On the other hand, we have the opposite point of view in some of the constructs that we can see in the DBTG proposals. Let us look first at the classic example of a data base concerning suppliers S, parts P, and shipments SP. In the network approach you have two set types, the S-SP and P-SP, in addition to the three record types. In the S-SP set every supplier is an owner and then you have SP member records. Similarly, in the P-SP set occurrence, every part is an owner and the member records are of type SP.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.2 DATABASE MANAGEMENT
      H.2.4 Systems
          Subjects: Relational databases

Additional Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.2 DATABASE MANAGEMENT
      H.2.1 Logical Design
          Subjects: Data models

General Terms:
Management