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Postings from May 2010
Yuval Kogman wrote: > There's another implied argument, that a DB should be relational for the > sake of being relational, instead of due to some other reason. > > If you're doing aggregation or relational queries then yes, a relational > database makes sense (unless OLAP makes more sense, but whatever ;-) > > However, in an OLTP context, a relational schema might not offer clear > benefits over something else, and in general people have a habit of using > them anyway, and working really really hard to use them too, without having > an actual reason except that they're used to it. > > Just because you *can* represent a graph as 3-tuples (RDF style) or a table > of vertices and a table of edges, doesn't mean that you should. There may be > easier ways to traverse and work on a graph, depending on what you actually > need to do. I recognize that the relational model isn't always the best tool for the job of managing data, but I do believe it is the best tool to reach for by default, when you don't have a rationale to use something else. As for the examples you cited, well you have rationalized using some other tool for those jobs, so that doesn't conflict with what I said in the previous sentence. -- Darren DuncanThread Previous | Thread Next