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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Re: Why REST was Re: URIs are simply names
 2/17/2002 1:34:28 AM, "Gary Stephenson" <garys@i...> wrote: > >How "truthful" is the analogy of considering the entire world of >URI-addressable HTTP resources as one gigantic database, the HTTP protocol >itself as the DBMS, and URIs as the key-values. Is the analogy close enough >to warrant further scrutiny of the best practices in the DBMS world? Does >the success of CGI systems indicate, at least in part, the usefulness of the >analogy? Hmmmm ... it's certainly not a *relational* DBMS, maybe a giant CODASYL-like DBMS ... but I've been wondering about Date's vehement objection to "pointers" in the context of XML too. I think he's probably onto something, and having some way of "JOIN-ing" web resources based on value comparisons rather than chasing pointers will probably add a lot of value ... someday. BTW, could you elaborate on "the success of CGI systems" ... not sure how that relates. > >I also suspect that a fuller understanding than my own of exactly why Date >is so adamantly against ObjectIDs (aka references/pointers) appearing as >part of the logical data model would provide useful insights on some of the >issues surrounding URIs vs URLs/URNs, entities vs. resources, and the >further development of REST-ful best practices. Thanks for jumping in! This is a very interesting thought, IMHO. A few random comments ... - Date is rather adamant that the computer/database industry has limited itself by hacking on a failed database model (hierarchical/network) and grafting on faddish OO notions rather than fully implementing and appreciating the relational model. The obvious rejoinder is that the industry builds on what actually works in practice, and the market weeds out those who can't make their ideas generate actual economic value for their customers. I sometimes wonder if Date's canonical rant isn't analogous to someone channeling Turing and saying that we should all stick to the conceptual model of an infinite tape that reads and writes marks and moves forward or backward .... since that is elegant, provably correct and universal. - I'm not sure what the practical limit on the number of tables that current RDBMs can JOIN across, but it is quite a few orders of magnitude less than the number of "resources" on the internet. The Web, hack though it may be, actually WORKS! - Could a DBMS the size of the Web apply Date's principles and/or DBMS best practice without solving the "type" problem? A pointer doesn't care what it points to, but a JOIN implies some congruence of the values being joined ... not to mention the foreign/primary key constraints, right? - I do think that the "use RDBMS theory and best practice" could indeed apply to metadata management more than current practice indicates. I can't sit through an RDF presentation without thinking very similar thoughts to those that Gary Stephenson posted ..."Hmmm, this sounds a lot like the stuff that Date rails against ... mightn't these folks learn a lot from studying the relational model and improving on its limitations rather than inventing network databases over again?" The best "here's why not" answer I've gotten to this (I remember it was from Michael Kay) is that RDF itself is normalizeable into relational form but SQL can't practically handle the recursive queries it would take to answer any interesting questions about the knowledge the RDF represents. Date, not surprisingly, implies that this is a limitation of SQL, not the relational model, and that the way forward lies in actually implementing a relational database as Codd defined it. 
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