Re: stonebraker diffs RDBMS

[Christian Voelker <C(dot)Voelker(at)gmx(dot)net>]

Am 11.09.2007 um 14:34 schrieb Brian Hurt:

> Robert Bernier wrote:
>
> > Two links here, comments anybody?
> >
> > http://www.computerworlduk.com/technology/applications/databases/ 
> > news/index.cfm?newsid=5059
> >
> > http://www.databasecolumn.com/
> >
> > Robert
>
> OK, I'm being stupid here- can someone please explain to me the  
> difference between a column-oriented database and a fully  
> normalized row-oriented database?

I guess, these are questions belonging to core implementation decisions.
With every select you make, whole rows are loaded depending on  
conditions
you specify in your query. This is opposite to searching columns first,
finding rows that meet all conditions in the results. For me it looks a
bit like using an index for each field and everything, but that me be
a very basic understanding of what is dicussed here. In the end, there
will be reasons why RDBMS are such successful. The object DBs have been
around for a while and are gaining momentum slowly but steadily.

The performance argument has always been two edged for a basic decision
on development directions. While performance increase of a magnitude
might open a whole range of new applications it gets eaten up by
hardware acceleration overtime. Novell had a really tough time when
turning from Netware 3 to 4 partly because they made the base assumption
that PC hardware will always be to slow for complex software. What was
their success in Version 3 made them too slow when developing new
features and they lost against Microsoft with their brand new but
then performance encumbered Windows NT. You know what has happened
meanwhile.

Bye, Christian