Is Relational Obsolete?

Please put forward any views you have on the point that Oracle is Object/Relational, and the Relational model is now obsolete.

1 comment:

  1. Object/Relational is a definite improvement for two reasons that I can name off the bat. First, it allows me to interface better with Object Oriented application development tools. Second, it lets me define my own complex datatypes - telephone number and address types come to mind. However, Relational is NOT obsolete. In fact, I'd rather use Object Views of Relational tables for interfacing with Object Oriented applications, than Object Tables.

    Let me give you an example from a system I worked on. It is a Purchase Request(PR)/Purchase Order(PO) system. PRs and POs as objects are very similar. You can think of each as consisting of information related to the entire PR or PO, such as the customer account number, plus information related to each item being ordered - what, how many, cost of each. If that was all, Object Relational would be fine. However, items from one or more PRs can be combined to create one or more items in one or more POs. You have to maintain these many to many relationships between PR items and PO items, because when the orders are filled, the items have to be distributed back to the people who requested them. This would be difficult to do if the items weren't in separate relations from the parent PR and PO records.

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