Codd is to computing as Galen was to medicine!
BobJ

BobJ wrote:
Bob:

1 What would you have said in a short discussion?

2. If this "He created his own theories from those principles"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galen is what you are referring to, it
seems that Galen had a lot more practical aspects to his theories than
Teddy Codd.

Henry Keultjes

The Wik article is fine example of political correctness. Most references
credit Galen with setting medicine back at least 500 years with his strong
but wrong views.
BobJ
<csigline (AT) hotmail (DOT) com> wrote

However, I don't see Codd quite that way. Upon Codd's theories a huge
industry has been built, ripe for the Picking.

Henr

IMHO Codd's database theories were just one of a number of database design
methodologies that have been around... Codd just happened to be in the
right place at the right time to get his theories accepted over other
competing ones.

Whilst I can see positives in some of his "laws", I believe that the whole
row/coumn tabular concept that Relational Theory is based is very poor for
the real world. Anybody who has designed databases for Relational and MV
use for real world business apps will know that.

However, having said that, it is Relational databases that have all the good
tools built in to do the job neatly - MV has been left behind in this regard
even though I believe that it is a superior methodology. Basically, in
terms of core database design and retrieval, we aren't a great deal further
forward than we were 20 years ago... This is possibly a little bland, as
most variants have some support for SQL etc, but this is just a poor attempt
at making MV look relational for data access...

With the advent of XML, we are now free to take over the world as it all
prepares for the next generation of database design (XML based)... RD's are
struggling to encompass this, we should be ahead.. but we aren't!

Just some random thoughts on the topic!

Regards
Simon
<csigline (AT) hotmail (DOT) com> wrote

"Simon Verona" wrote:
Exactly. It's called "marketing". SQL was also a facilitator since
it was developed simultaneously with the data model. Having a query
language was/is far easier than writing COBOL, Fortran, EasyCoder,
AutoCoder, or BAL to access your ISAM files. Pick had TCL and
English/Access/Recall, but just didn't tell anyone.

Speaking of such things, I don't have the bandwidth but maybe someone
else can take a look at this. Here is a page about non-relational
databases available for Linux.
http://linas.org/linux/db-non-sql.html
Note the comment under Pick and Pick-Compatible Databases: "This list
is very incomplete, as I have been ignoring these."

And then there are university pages like this one that don't even
mention the Pick model:
http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~shekhar...baseLinks.html

Well folks, when we have no community agency for doing marketing, this
is what we get.

Whateva..
T

"Tony Gravagno" <g6q3x9lu53001 (AT) sneakemail (DOT) com.invalid> wrote

You will note that the linas.org list has not been updated since mid 2003...
Also, most of the listsings mention that the poster has been ignoring
them...

But yes, agreed... MV generally needs promoting as a *SOLUTION* to the
current and future hurdles of business data storage requirements rather than
an anachornism. But that needs a lot of funds to do properly - this
begs three questions :-

1. Does the community (developers, end users, vars, distributors as well
as the MV database companies themselves) have the desire to do this?
2. How can this be funded? This is a long term funding requirement, not
just some money today.
3. Who should actually do the work? A Not for Profit entity possibly?

Also, there hasn't been a multi-value standard that has any commonality
since R83. Perhaps a new standard needs to be ratified which is a superset
of most of the standards but also pushes forward the MV design to the next
level (I'm not going to repeat my previous posts on the subject) - it seems
to be that taking R83 as a base, all the products have gone seperate ways
with regard to .net/obdc/java etc etc. Perhaps such an organisation can get
involved in this? Perhaps a collaboration ?

Out of interest, I believe that Tony is probably best placed to head up such
as orgainsation - he has both the background and the technological
understanding, though a collaboration with International Spectrum (I think
that's what it's called?) may be of beneft. At the end of the day, whoever
does this will need funding..

For what it's worth, I'm prepared to put £25 per licence I sell into the
pot...

Just some thoughts....

Regards
Simon

Tony Gravagno wrote:
Tony, etal:

I believe that the MV subculture will survive in little pockets around
the world for many decades,

BUT it will take years and years to overcome the non-image /
counterculture stigma that we gained back in the '70s & '80s. We never
had an industry champion to bring the quiet victories out of the
shadows into the spotlight.

MV is winning battles to this day, but known only to insiders on the
vendor sales force (it's always been that way, very proprietary),
"secret success".

I will make a technical suggestion for some energetic soul. To quote
Dick (he was referring to religion) -- "It's time for a new book!".
Complete the project, finish the system.

The seminal development effort was overwhelmed by early partial success
(and distractions). The maintenance of the day to day, version control
issues became the focus. Subsequent licensees / look-alikes focused on
replication of functionality. I'm sure occasionally someone thought
about high-order theoretical goals, but there hasn't been a revolution.

John Bohner

I think thats exactly my point, in terms of feature functionality... the MV
systems themselves seem to have remained static in recent years (no advances
in English/Access for example).

When I discuss a new standard - I don't mean just ratifying what is already
present, but to actually "push" the technology forward - so for example MV
products could decalre themselves MV2006 compliant.

Regards
Simon


"obsolete_john" <obsolete_john (AT) yahoo (DOT) com> wrote

Jeff