Monday, September 17, 2012

Quote of the Week



The products commonly known as Oracle, Exadata, DB2, Sybase, SQL Server, Teradata, Sybase IQ, Netezza, Vertica, Greenplum, Aster, Infobright, SAND, ParAccel, Exasol, Kognitio et al. all either are or incorporate relational database management systems, aka RDBMS or relational DBMS.

2. In principle, there can be difficulties in judging whether or not a DBMS is “relational”. In practice, those difficulties don’t arise — yet. Every significant DBMS still falls into one of two categories:

    Relational:
        Was designed to do relational stuff* from the get-go, even if it now does other things too.
        Supports a lot of SQL.
    Non-relational:
        Was designed primarily to do non-relational things.*
        Doesn’t support all that much SQL.

*I expect the distinction to get more confusing soon, at which point I’ll adopt terms more precise than “relational things” and “relational stuff”.
--Curt Monash

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