Anthony W. Youngman skrev:
In message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Mats Carlid <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes
Anthony W. Youngman skrev:
At which point, you hit my hobbyhorse ... "In the real world ..." -
relational database theory has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING whatsoever to do
with the real world. It's an exercise in pure maths.
And You hit my hobbyhorse or rather one of them :-) ...
RDMS theory is absolutely not pure maths!
So you'd say it's applied maths? Getting off-topic, but I've never
really understood the difference (as in how it is defined) between
pure and applied. I know you can look at a problem and "know" which is
which, but how do you define it?
No I don't have a definition of pure math's. Maybe high abstraction
leval mathematics
is a better word for it.
<digressing>
A very narrow defintion could be maths so abstract that it will never
find an application ?
But no - remember the 19century guys develloping the theory for
non-linear multidimensional
spaces ( Riemann et. al. ) and tensors - they thought they had a
absolutely pure theory wich would
never find an application and so did others until Eistein published
the general theory of relatlivity only a few decades later ...
</digressing>
I really wanted to express two opinions :
1. RDBMS is not more pure maths than Pick.is.
It's just a heavily restricted special case of abstract relation theory.
It's more restricted than Pick.
The restirctions are from a 'pure' mathematical point of view
totally arbitrary - but justifiable from an engineering standpoint
- except the 1NF of course :-)
2. RDBMS is not anywhere near the abstraction level
of the general theory of relations and certainly is not
the mathematical relation theory - as sometimes advocated.
-- mats
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