http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html?node=342335011

An Amazon SimpleDB domain is like a worksheet,
items are like rows of data, attributes are like
column headers, and values are the data entered
in each of the cells.

However unlike a spreadsheet, Amazon SimpleDB
allows for multiple values to be associated with
each "cell" (e.g., for item "123," the attribute
"color" can have both value "blue" and value "red").

Sounds oddly familiar.

--
frosty

It'll never work. Codd said so.

Tony opined:
I was gonna post to cdt, but then I realized:
I don't care what those folks think. Appears
that Amazon doesn't, either.

--
frosty

Hi
A fascinating concept, I wonder where it came from. Must admit I find it
interesting to hear a file called a domain.
I look forward to some interesting billing discussions when people list
their 10GB files.
Peter McMurray
"frosty" <frostyj (AT) bogus (DOT) tld> wrote

On Dec 16, 12:08 pm, "frosty" <fros... (AT) bogus (DOT) tld> wrote:
He was actually a tad bit smarter than that, I think, at least until
he got caught up in the whirlwind marketing blitz known as the
relational database. Codd knew that you certainly COULD do that. It
is his disciples and then vendors who messed it up IMHO, not to
mention the SQL language.

And you are, of course, a smarter man than I, Frosty ;-) but I am
finally to the point of agreement on this one now that somehow the
industry on the whole no longer seems to care. It might not be
exactly Pick, but the Pick approach to multivalues, use of two-valued
logic, use of a primary key (the relational model, in theory, has
candidate keys and not one selected as primary), variable length
fields (these days a lot of developers using rdbms's just make every
field 50 in length unless they have a reason to change it from that),
along with user-defined functions (virtual fields, computed columns,
calculated attributes all equal what we called I-descriptors in Prime
Information) are all back "in." Navigation replacing some of the set-
based logic has not found its way back in a big way, although perhaps
some tools help facilitate that too.

And don't forget, the "epoch date" (term used by Cache' for day 0 on
their calendar) for Pick gets a 40th birthday this New Year's Eve.
Databases have definitely had improvements during that time, but many
folks are returning to the simple and elegant model of data pre-dates
the relational model, whether they realize it or not.
Cheers! --dawn