Re: Proper relational database?

On 04/22/2016 06:21 AM, David Goodenough wrote:
> On Thursday 21 April 2016 13:36:54 Guyren Howe wrote:
>> Anyone familiar with the issue would have to say that the tech world would
>> be a significantly better place if IBM had developed a real relational
>> database with an elegant query language rather than the awful camel of a
>> thing that is SQL.
>>
>> If I had a few $million to spend in a philanthropical manner, I would hire
>> some of the best PG devs to develop a proper relational database server.
>> Probably a query language that expressed the relational algebra in a
>> scheme-like syntax, and the storage model would be properly relational (eg
>> no duplicate rows).
>>
>> It's an enormous tragedy that all the development effort that has gone into
>> NoSQL database has pretty much all gotten it wrong: by all means throw out
>> SQL, but not the relational model with it. They're all just rehashing the
>> debate over hierarchical storage from the 70s. Comp Sci courses should
>> feature a history class.
>>
>> It's a bit odd to me that someone isn't working on such a thing.
>>
>> Just curious what folks here have to say…
> Well when IBM were first developing relational databases there were two
> different teams.  One in California which produced System-R which became
> what we now know as DB2 and spawned SQL, and the other in Peterlee in
> the UK which was called PRTV (the Peterlee Relational Test Vehicle).  PRTV
> rather died but bits of it survived.  In particular it was the first to system
> to include a relational optimiser.  You can find some details on the PRTV
> page in Wikipedia.
>
> It was written in PL/1, although it also used some modified microcode
> and therefore some assembler.
>
> It never appeared as a product, but there was a geographical system
> which built on top of it which was if I recall corrected used by the Greater
> London Council and Central Region Scotland, which did something of
> what postgis does for PostgreSQL.
>
> According to the Wikipedia page it did have a language (ISBL) but from what
> I recall (and it was nearly 40 years ago) there were a series of PL/1
> function calls we used rather than encoding the request as a string
> as SQL systems require.
>
> The IBM centre in Peterlee was closed, and the lab moved to Winchester
> where I think it still resides.
One of the people involved in that was Hugh Darwen, who is one of the
authors of The Third Manifesto, which is an attempt to define what a
properly relational language and system should look like. So you could
say the experience of ISBL vs SQL has been folded into that effort.