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RE: Jim Gray article on Next Generation Databases

• To: "'bob@w...'" <bob@w...>, 'Ken North' <kennorth@s...>, xml-dev@l...
• Subject: RE: Jim Gray article on Next Generation Databases
• From: "Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <len.bullard@i...>
• Date: Thu, 5 May 2005 09:28:33 -0500

Which is why Alan Kay says software development is a 
pop culture: it recycles songs, ideas, and people 
in accordance with bandwidth, processor power, and 
depth of understanding (necessarily shallow and not 
always historically aware).

But the interesting part is that the Gray clearly articulates  
that unstructured and weakly structured data isn't going 
away, so we should deal with it.  If that means pulling 
out ways we understand that are simple, approximate and 
reliable even if old, so much the better.  I'd rather 
deal with prior art frankly.  I began looking at quantum 
logic (fab if you had the hardware) but found I circled 
back to VSMs because a) they work and b) we understand them.

In the Hytime standard, there is a locator type called 
fcsloc (finite coordinate system locator) that was applied 
to page layout.  But at the time, we discussed how the 
same kinds of locators could be applied to conceptual 
maps such as VSM produces.  Things diverged into topic 
maps but I suspect that they will converge again shortly 
and as typical, in a simpler form.   Using a VSM approach 
to generate a first cut or tunable topic map isn't that 
far-fetched.

len


From: Bob Wyman [mailto:bob@w...]

Claude L Bullard wrote:
>I like this part:
> "One interesting development worth noting, however, has to do 
> with the integration of database systems and file systems..."
	This is a "development"? Doesn't anyone remember VAX/VMS? It had RMS
(Records Management System) which presented the user with a choice of file
types: sequential, block I/O, record oriented, indexed, etc. All built-in.
Having indexed ISAM files as a core function of the operating system was a
wonderful thing... 
	I remember meetings in the mid-80s when we were seriously
considering bundling a stripped down version of RDB (our relational
database) as a component of the VMS operating system as well. The thinking
was that since we could see how all of our application products would be
enhanced if they used RDB for data storage, it might make it easier for us
to build and ship products if developers could simply assume that there was
an RDBMS available on every platform. 

		bob wyman (ex-DEC)

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