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All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

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  • I still haven't worked out why outlines are da bomb.

    Reason #1: Dave has been writing outliners for 20 years. If outliners weren't da bomb, why would he have wasted so much of his life writing them (and made so much money selling them)?

    Reason #2: Microsoft grokked Outliners. Look at Word. Look at their market cap and their market share. Apple didn't grok Outliners. Look at MacWrite II. Look at their market cap and their market share. Any questions? (aside from the obvious one: Why won't Apple

    • Reason #3: Most structures are hierarchical, can be made to fit into a hierarchical format, or be gently eased into one. A list, for example, is a flat hierarchy.

      This is obviously it. Look at the huge success enjoyed by hierarchical databases like H-Oracle, Hibase, and MyHQL. Sure, it seemed threatened by that crazy "relational model" stuff a while back, but the hierarchical model, which maps so well onto most real world processes and data, was never really in danger.

      • The part that you're not taking into account is that this is mostly for human data. Most people do not want their data to be relational (well, at least not normalized), because it would put the incentive on them to find out things. Imagine trying to look up an address for Bob Foo and getting back "42, StreetID=2573, CityID=09708, CountryID=25". It wouldn't be very useful.

        Relational databases are made to be customized by people that create schemata *. Hierarchical is just one approach that happens t

        --

        -- Robin Berjon [berjon.com]

        • I'm not concerned with the _speed_ of hierarchical databases, I'm concerned with the flexibility.

          It is a fact that an hierarchical structure can be expressed in the relational model. I do not think that the reverse is true.

          I fail to see the purpose of an XML database.

          I defy you to come up with a useful XML database schema (whatever that would be! a DTD?) that can easily handle, for the sake of argument, information about films.

          This would be quite difficult given the fact that this sort of data is in no

          • Re:Outliners (Score:2)

            by ziggy (25) on 2002.04.16 9:14 (#7072) Journal
            It is a fact that an hierarchical structure can be expressed in the relational model. I do not think that the reverse is true.
            Cough [cpan.org]
            • No, that expresses the result of a query as XML, which is not at all the same thing.

              I suppose you could come up with a query that joined all your tables together and then dump it as XML. That'll be real useful, no doubt.

              But it's true, I shouldn't have said that the hierarchical model cannot handle relational data. I should have said that it cannot handle most relational data in any useful and meaningful way.
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