Note: "Then & Now" (T&N) is a new version of what used to be the "Oldies but Goodies" (OBG) series. To demonstrate the superiority of a sound theoretical foundation relative to the industry's fad-driven "cookbook" practices, as well as the evolution/progress of RDM, I am re-visiting my 2000-06 debunkings, bringing them up to my with my knowledge and understanding of today. This will enable you to judge how well my arguments have held up and appreciate the increasing gap between scientific progress and the industry’s stagnation, if not outright regress.

This was an email exchange with a reader, first published as ON ON-THE-FLY THINKING in March 2005.

“From a quick one-page marketing article:

"Relational databases are one to two orders of magnitude too slow."
--Michael Stonebreaker, quoted in Data on the Fly, Forbes

The quote is directly from the company's owner who "...created two well-known relational database systems, Ingres and Postgres." Further from the reporter:

"Unlike traditional database programs, Streambase analyzes data without storing it to disk, performing queries on data as it flows."

Hmmm... didn't know that the Relational Model of Data specifically proscribed in-memory implementations.”

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My Response Then...

Nothing new [and quite typical] from those who design SQL DBMSs, then turn around and criticize them as RDBMSs that perform badly and develop other non-RDBMSs that purportedly perform better, implying that it's because they are not relational. In reality, performance has nothing to do with RDM and everything to do with implementation. Nothing prevented them from building in-memory true RDBMSs.

The reporter should have asked Informix/IBM whatever happened to Illustra, the product that Stonebraker was pushing before Streambase with similar rhetoric. Beware of academics with business interests.

... and Now

Stonebraker is the recipient of the 2014 Turing award and he developed several other commercial products since then. He certainly knew better than expressing his views the way he did. Had he not been a vendor, he would have probably refrained from misleading by referring to SQL DBMSs as relational and implying that RDBMSs are inherently slow, particularly as the author of Ingres that sported QUEL, a query language relationally superior to SQL.

He could have, for example, said:
“Current SQL DBMSs are way too slow. But performance has nothing to do with their being relational (which in fact they are not) -- it is determined exclusively by implementation and one way in which it can be improved for any DBMS, including SQL and truly relational, is an in-memory implementation.”

Note: Of course, at that time the McGoveran interpretation of the RDM -- his re-interpretation of Codd's work was not known -- so even had SQL been properly designed, it would still not be considered such today, given the new understanding.