With all due respect, Dawn, you are an idiot.
"Dawn M. Wolthuis" <dwolt@iserv.net> wrote in message
news:6db906b2.0310091212.4f967cf5@posting.google.com...
> Good question. Although I would want to move away from relational
> databases too, if there is an RDBMS and one wants to query it, what
> would I aim for? If you look at XQuery, you will see an example of
> what I would definitely NOT aim for. Although the user of such a
> language might very well be a technical person, instead of starting
> with mathematics (relational calculus, relational algebra) I would
> suggest starting with language. The mathematics of language is more
> complex than the mathematics of relations, particularly simple
> relations (such as 1NF tables).
>
> If you look at the history of data persistence prior to Codd's 1970
> ACM paper, you will see several attempts at this. One I have studied
> of late is GIRLS (Generalized Information Retrieval Language and
> System), specified by Don Nelson and implemented by several folks with
> the most famous being Dick Pick. This GIRLS language was specified a
> full 40 years ago and lives today in many IT shops under a variety of
> about 10 different names, including IBM's UniQuery and Retrieve (for
> UniData and Universe respectively). This language is flawed, as are
> all, but so very close to what I would think would be a good approach.
> It was written at TRW in order to make it so that the military in
> Viet Nam could query their data without technical folks in the field.
> It went into production in 1969 with the US Army. Prior to the end of
> the cold war, it was used by the CIA to track (the associated
> database) and query about Russion spies in the US.
>
> I would suggest ditching the entire relational model (as both overly
> simplistic in its theory and overly complex in its implementation) and
> start with English (that is one of the other names for the GIRLS
> language). Note that language is also the starting point for putting
> data in XML documents, but it sure doesn't seem to be the starting
> point for XQuery, eh?
>
> --dawn
> Dawn M. Wolthuis
> www.tincat-group.com
