Re: Good Books on MultiValue Databases

On Jun 5, 8:53 pm, mattk...@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
I just took over handling IT/Programming for a company that is using a
highly customized version of D3 on a nix box. When I took the job, I
have to admit I was intrigued by the multivalue database, however, I
am starting to look at it with a bit of loathing. One of my biggest
problems, is finding decent reading materials on this monster, that
don't incorporate extensive propoganda about how great multivalue
databases are. So, if anyone has a list of good books I would be
grateful.

Coming from a SQL Server / Oracle background, this DB is requiring me
to unlearn everything I have learned over the years. I usually pick up
new languages very quickly, however AQL has so many non standard
syntactic commands that I seem to do nothing but reference the book.
Is there any reason that they havn't updated AQL to mesh with
syntactic standards that have evolved over the last 20 years?

Also, any references to people have experience porting Multivalue
Databases over to SQL Server would be great. I am tempted to just
print the entire DB and manually re-enter it into a real database that
has a standard interface and can be normalized. This garbage about
multivalue going beyond the 4th normal form, is just a blatent
misreading of the definition. But, I digress.

Most people here are replying with the "Pick is the greatest and you
are a dumbo" response. Which infuriates me. The smugness of many Pick
folks is inappropriate and (often) unfounded. You are asking for help,
not criticism.

I will answer you straight.

Pick and its derivatives are based on a filing system with some non-
standard database features built on top. Applications frequently speak
directly to the filing system (using record ids and read statements).
This bypasses all the protections you would expect in a normal DBMS
(which is pretty scary) but does put a lot of "power and flexibility"
in the hands of the developer. Pick is a "close to the metal" kind of
product, with which you can bash out code quickly. That is very
appealing. The downside, of course, is that you have to tread very
carefully since you can mis-use these low level features to create a
nasty hackitecture.

If you do move away from Pick, you will lose the "close to the metal"
feel, but gain the protections of a full-bodied DBMS.

An additional advantage of Pick is that it uses an essentially type-
free scripting language (a derivative of BASIC) which, again, will
help you program much faster than in a strongly types language (again,
losing the protections therein). There are more modern scripting
languages that are at least as good (Python, Ruby, even good old
Smalltalk and Lisp) but using these to talk to Pick is not trivial.

The main hurdle you will find in porting to a DBMS will not be (as
some folk would have you believe) that the DBMS is inferior to Pick,
but that moving from a filing-system based, BASIC-Scripted application
to more mainstream technologies is simply a lot of work. This porting
effort (plus long experience in Pick) scares many away from attempting
such things.

.

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