On 3/28/07, Mark T <paradisaeidae / gmail.com> wrote:
> OpenQM is a multi-field database based on Pick/Universe/Everyone...
> "OpenQM uses the post-relational model in which the First Law of
> Normalisation is discarded, allowing multiple values such as a list of
> products in an order to be stored together."

This is complete and utter nonsense. "Post-relational" is a completely
nonsensical term, and the understanding of the first law of
normalisation is incorrect or incomplete or both to be able to say
that.

I wouldn't trust OpenQM for anything given this response you were
given. The list of products in an order are *related* to the order;
how you store those values *physically* is completely irrelevant to
how you model that relationship. There's no such thing as
"post-relational" with a theory of data that is even remotely
comprehensible in any way. "Post-relational" is short for "I don't get
relational theory, therefore, I'm going to try to sound like I know
better than Codd." You don't.

If I'm understanding the physical structure correctly, Oracle offers
something similar; it's called a table column such that you can define
a column in a table as an array or table to tightly tie the data
together in a relationship. Interestingly, Oracle will often store the
table column data *externally* to the container table -- that is,
Oracle will still represent it as a traditional table/related-table
model even though they're allowing the user to do stupid things with
normalisation.

> Q: When you put this against node-xml access, does xml imply it also
> discards the First Law?
> A: http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2002/11/13/normalizing.html

XML as a data storage technique is no more than old-style hierarchical
datastores returned to haunt us. (It does have a couple of techniques
that IMO are mildly interesting, in that you can use XLink and
references to get proper normalization, but vanilla XML is purely
hierarchical.)

-austin
-- 
Austin Ziegler * halostatue / gmail.com * http://www.halostatue.ca/
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               * austin / zieglers.ca