Re: Writing apps for ORDBMS

Oh, yes, there is controversy. I have Date&Darwen's rants as
well as Stonebraker's. And I have found that sometimes practicality
overrides all arguments. I hope to take this practical slant in the book.

But in the interest of disclosure, I've worked for three
(or two, depending on how you count) Stonebraker companies, ingres,
illustra and informix. For anyone who didn't already know, Michael
Stonebraker was one of the professors running the ingres project and
the main one running postgres at UCBerkeley. He co-founded Ingres
(aka Relational Technology) and Illustra (which was acquired by Informix).

elein(at)varlena(dot)com

On Monday 20 January 2003 12:35, Mike Mascari wrote:
> From: "elein" <elein(at)sbcglobal(dot)net>
>
> > This is the primary topic of my book in progress. (Don't
> > hold your breath, but I'm working on it...)
> >
> > I also recommend "The Plumber's Guide" by Paul Brown,
> > however all of the syntax comes from the informix 9 implementation
> > of ORDBMS which diverged from its conceptual postgres roots.
> > It also describes features which are specific to informix 9 and
> > are not relevant for postgresql.
> >
> > elein(at)varlena(dot)com
> >
> > On Monday 20 January 2003 10:51, Aurangzeb M. Agha wrote:
> > > Is there a white-paper or something out there on how to write apps
> > > which take advantage of the object-relational features of ORDBMS's?
> > >
> > > I'm using PostgreSQL right now, but I'm using it as a relational DB,
> > > meaning that I'm not taking advantage of, to my knowledge, any of the
> > > object capabilities of the DB.
> > >
> > > I've looked at techdocs but not found anything to my liking.
>
> There is also a bit of a dispute going on as to the value of the object
> "models" that have thus far been put forward. Date & Darwen argue in
> "Foundation for Future Database Systems", that the "relvar = class"
> equation is the DBMS world's "First Great Blunder". They argue that domain
> inheritance, which is orthogonal to the relational model, has merit but
> that relation variable inheritance (such as that implemented in PostgreSQL)
> does not.
>
> Mike Mascari
> mascarm(at)mascari(dot)com

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