“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…”