Enfranchised Mind

The core of relational calculus operates on relations, aka tables. There are three main operators, all of which work on relations/tables: join, which takes two relations and creates a third relation which consists of all possible pairings of the rows of the two original relations; selection, which takes a relation and creates a new relation with only a subset of rows of the original relation; and projection, which takes a relation and creates a new relation with a subset of the columns of the old relation



These three operations are the core, the heart and soul, of relational calculus—which is the core of SQL. To faithfully model SQL we must, on some level, faithfully model the relational calculus. And this is where I think the Object Oriented programmers go astray in trying to interface to SQL. In their hurry to make things into objects, they immediately (and without fail) declare the rows to be objects—and thus miss the fact that relational calculus and thus SQL is about relations, not rows.



They’re abstracting at the wrong level.

Update

: Here’s your homework: compare and contrast the Relational Algebra with the Relational Calculus . Does SQL implement the algebra or the calculus? If your answer is Algebra, propose an OO model of the Calculus; if your answer is Calculus, propose an OO model of the Algebra.

A post on(fabulous blog name!) nails the ORM problem:What strikes me about this quote is the real value in learning new programming paradigms—like functional programming—where stuff other than Plain Old Objects (“POO”) is raised to first class status. When functions can be passed functions as parameters and return functions from functions, we start to think about manipulating the functions themselves, rather than manipulating dumb data.The same goes for continuations, environments, super-strong typing, and a host of other ideas that have been known to the programming community for decades. Even if they aren’t a formal part of your current language, they are a valuable part of your perspective on how to use your language to solve problems.In the case of modeling SQL, there is no reason why standard OO cannot model joins, selections, and projections with ease. All it takes is the flash of insight that it’s important to think about a relational database that way.