Re: ORDBMS

On Fri, 28 Jan 2000, Chris Bitmead wrote:

> Peter Eisentraut wrote:
>
> > I think putting some work and thought into inheritance and making it work
> > right would make a lot of people very happy, and inheritance is one of the
> > major ideas behind OO in any context. Another thing to expand upon would
> > be using classes ("tables") as datatypes. I believe this is doesn't work
> > all that well. But we're surely "ORDBMS material", if you like.
>
> Yes, postgres pretends that classes as datatypes work, but if I remember
> right it doesn't work in practice.
>
> > Pure object-oriented databases (which is where the oid thing comes from)
> > are somewhat separate though, they represent a paradigm shift similar to
> > moving from, say, hierarchical or network databases to relational ones.
>
> Yeh, but this need not be so. There is no necessary conflict between
> the requirements of RDBMS and ODBMS. Postgres plus a couple of features
> would quite fulfill both paradigms. Why no commercial vendor seems
> to have done this very well I don't know.
>
> > The research in that area is not at all complete and it lacks a
> > standardized query language and a whole bunch of other stuff.
>
> Not really true. There IS a standard object query language called OQL,
> which
> is supported by some ODBMSes. OQL is basicly SQL, except you don't have
> to
> specify WHERE criteria when it's obvious and a few bits and pieces.
> There
> is no reason you couldn't support SQL+OQL because they don't really
> contradict.
>
> > Since a
> > major goal of this project is moving ever closer to SQL compliance,
> > becoming an "OODB" is not in the near future.
>
> I would have thought what was in the near future, is whatever people
> choose to hack on. I take it no-one is going to reject sensible patches
> along this line?

As long as a patch doesnt' break current functionality, definitely not
... if implementing OOL meant removign SQL, forget it ... if it can be
added to augment what w already have, patch away ...

Marc G. Fournier ICQ#7615664 IRC Nick: Scrappy
Systems Administrator @ hub.org
primary: scrappy(at)hub(dot)org secondary: scrappy(at){freebsd|postgresql}.org