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All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

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Databases Suck 1 Comment More | Login | Reply /

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  • Anyone who has worked with software long enough knows that the relational model does not map well to the real world.

    Then pick any of the following:

    s/relational/procedural/
    s/relational/object oriented/
    s/relational/functional/
    s/relation/logical/
    s/relation/aspect oriented/
    s/relational/hierarchical/

    Continuing this list is left as an exercise for the reader :-)

    Models are not the real world. They're an abstraction chosen to make a particular problem domain easier to manipulate. Sometimes people pick the wrong model. Sometimes the problem domain changes.

    There's nothing that's particularly relational about the issue about whether addresses are separate "things" from customers. I've seen exactly the same issue with OO code.

    In other words, the database reflects domain knowledge but you, the poor fool having to maintain it, can't tell from looking at a database schema if it's really reflecting business knowledge or if it's a mistake.

    And I can't tell just by looking at a object class hierarchy whether a particularly odd looking arrangement of classes is a reflection of business knowledge or if it's a mistake.

    Being normalised doesn't say anything about the fitness of a relational model for a particular problem domain any more than the Law of Demeter says anything about the fitness of an OO model for a particular problem domain.

    Relational models that are normalised have nice properties that can be useful. OO models that follow the Law of Demeter have nice properties that can be useful. They're talking about how good the model is. I don't think it's really fair to ask them to say things about how well a model fits a problem domain too!

    Which of course would be a wonderful thing to know.... wish I knew how to figure it out... :-)

    Object databases and multivalue databases can get around many of these problems by allowing data to be arranged in a heirarchical fashion instead of a relational one

    I'm curious why you think heirarchies and relation models are contradictory (nested set tree model and all that...) ?

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