On Thu, May 06, 2004 at 01:21:28PM -0500, Puneet Kishor wrote: > Frankly, I am not sure if there is anything exciting left in relational > databases to discover or create... most has been created and > well-tested over the past 3 decades. What is left is making a tool
No way, that is not true! Certainly both C.J. Date and Rick Snodgrass would both vehemently disagree, although probably for different reasons. Some concrete examples: - User defined types, aka good "object" support (Date's "Third Manifesto"). - Native bi-temporal support, or even just good support for one of valid-time or transaction-time (Snodgrass). This one in particular I would defnitely have used if it was available. (This is probably related to supporting other dimensions well, like time.) See also: http://openacs.org/forums/message-view?message_id=105737 - Schema version control! CVS does an adequate job of automatically diffing and merging text files, but leaves lots of room for improvement (witness BitKeeper, Arch, all the commercial systems, etc.). AFAIK there is *NO* even CVS-level tool available for versioning and converting relational schemas ** which contain data **. If your database is empty, changing your schema is trivial. If it is full of data, making non-trivial modifications to your schema can quickly become very, very obnoxious. My guess is that 80% of the schema upgrade effort is automatable, but it has not been automated. (It can't be fully automated because when altering tables and re-factoring data, the schema patch tool can't always know where you wan tthe data to move from/to, an you the programmer need to tell explicitly tell it.) (I think I heard that Toad may help somewhat with that sort of thing for Oracle, but I never looked into it.) - Replication, scalability. It sure would be nice to just run a big huge RDBMS on a bunch of cheap 1U Linux boxes rather than a single big expensive SMP box, and just rack and stack a few more 1U boxes each time your database or user load gets bigger. Depending who you ask, this seems to currently either be not feasible at all, or so complicated and with such poor scalability that hardly anyone even tries it. See also: http://openacs.org/forums/message-view?message_id=128060 There are probably many other examples of significant unsolved RDBMS problems, too. -- Andrew Piskorski <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://www.piskorski.com/ --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
