Austin Ziegler wrote:
> Sorry, Daniel, but you didn't show anything. You *claimed* that
> they're similar; you conflated things that have no relationship
> whatsoever.

It might be impudent of me but have you considered that just maybe *you* 
are the one who can't *see* the relationship? But you are right I didn't 
show anything. Just take any ORM layer and the fact that you can 
directly and easily map a SQLDB to an object model is all the proof I 
need that a RDBMS *can* indeed be expressed as an object graph and that 
an OODB can therefore be relational.

> You're right that object graphs don't *have* to be hierarchical;
> object databases are uniformly so, though.

I have trouble believing that *all* of OODB implementers would be so 
stupid as to implement a hierarchical-only structure. If that is indeed 
the case then I can see that a being a complete waste of time.

It's now clear to me that we are arguing about different things; you 
about the (hierarchical) OODBs that you know and I about the 
(relational) OODBs that I can imagine. In the end, I believe OO is more 
about the physical model than the logical model of data.

Darn semantics strike again!

> I highly recommend you take
> the time it requires to study relational theory. I'm not a heavy
> practitioner myself, anymore -- I don't do stuff that needs databases
> right now.

Unfortunately my brain has a strong resistance to jargon-rich 
litterature such as academic papers or legalese. :-(

Daniel