On Sun, 8 Apr 2001, Bob Hall wrote:
> Doug,
>
> You've posted your usual good sense, combined with one statement I
> strongly disagree with.
>
> >One of
> >these products is a relational database management system. The other is a
> >quasi-SQL-like-front-end-to-systems-of-indexed-files that has never
> >concerned itself with things like standards conformance.
>
> The implication is that MySQL is not an RDBMS. The only attempt I
> know of to define an RDBMS was Codd's, and no DBMS has ever met the
> criteria he published in a paper in the late 80s (1986?). Even though
> Oracle doesn't meet the criteria of the best known definition (only
> definition?) of an RDBMS, we all seem to agree that Oracle is an
> RDBMS. An RDBMS is a DBMS designed to manage a relational database,
> and a database is relational because it stores data in linked,
> normalized tables.
The only thing I question in this is that without transaction support,
what exactly is MySQL "managing"? MySQL is providing an SQL frontend to a
bunch of tables and indices, that is it ... it is up to the programmer to
handle the "managing of data" part where it revolves around being
relational ...
Also, note, that even today, MySQL does not handle transactions, Berkeley
DB does, and its purely optional, and per table. So, effectively, it has
"transactional tables", its not a "transactional system" ... if you didn't
define a table for transactions when you created it, you just created your
weak link ... again, its not MySQL that manages the system, its the
programmer who has to do it ... *shrug*
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