"How many open source relational databases can you name? My friend Gabrielle recently sent me the links to two of them. However, if you're like most technical people, you probably don't know any--just as I didn't until recently. I can already imagine many of you saying 'bulls**t, what about MySQL and PostgreSQL?' (to name just two), but those are just databases, not relational databases. Noted (and controversial) database experts Chris Date and Hugh Darwen, building on the work of the founder of relational theory, Edgar F. Codd, have tried to educate people about the actual relational model but with little success. It's a strange world of relations, relvars, attributes and other things which sound familiar, but when you look closely, they're not.
"Recently I found myself quite proud of taking a moderately complex query and optimizing it so that it took about 5 seconds to run instead of 15 minutes..."
