The ORM Foundation

In response to Clifford, in great haste because I'm about to be away and out of communication until next Tuesday: (a) At the physical layer anything goes.  If some kind of "sparse matrix" gives desired performance while a more direct representation of the logical schema doesn't, then go for it.  (I have often made this ...

Just to say that I don't mind being called a relational purist.  After all, I can hardly deny it.  I claim, of course, that a "relationally pure" language, if well-designed by all other criteria of good language design, will be of more practical use than one that is impure (like SQL) and also well-designed by all other ...

Clifford wrote: "The problem with SQL is that for the implementations to get reasonable performance, facts should be clustered into tables that represent composite facts wherever that's possible." That point about performance is frequently made.  I always want to remark that performance is a characteristic of the ...

Hi again, Andy, I wrote my previous response to your first contributuon in this thread, before I noticed your second.  Here I just want to respond further to this, from you: "The reason why nulls are GOOD is precisely that the bag functions (e.g. AVG) which the system provides, are TRAINED to ignore rows containing ...

 Hi Andy (and all), I have to say I intensely dislike the use of the term "religious zealotry" in contexts such as the present.  I appreciate your apology (to Ken) and apparent retraction--of the term's usual connotation if not the term itself.  Chris Date and I would respond indignantly, claiming that we have put ...