Re^2: Typeless Relational Database

I'm not sure I see the difference between reading and writing to RAM and reading and writing to the HD in this regard.

At the end of the day the information is stored as a sequence of bytes. Whatever technique Perl uses to store a $scalar in RAM could be used in the same fashion to store it on the HD. Could it not?

Andrew Tomazos | andrew@tomazos.com | www.tomazos.com

Comment on Re^2: Typeless Relational Database

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Re^3: Typeless Relational Database by CountZero (Bishop) on Jul 01, 2005 at 08:37 UTC
In theory, yes; in practice, no. Reading/writing from/to RAM is many times faster and reorganizing the storage in RAM is much easier. In order to get any kind of acceptable speed out of your HD, lots of tables need to be updated and saved to allow fast access to the data. In RAM-storage, in a pinch you can simply walk through your RAM to find the data you need, if you do that on a HD, you can go out and get yourself a coffee (and a donut or a toasted bagel) and return before your data is found. CountZero "If you have four groups working on a compiler, you'll get a 4-pass compiler." - Conway's Law	[reply]

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Re^3: Typeless Relational Database
by CountZero (Bishop) on Jul 01, 2005 at 08:37 UTC

Reading/writing from/to RAM is many times faster and reorganizing the storage in RAM is much easier.

In order to get any kind of acceptable speed out of your HD, lots of tables need to be updated and saved to allow fast access to the data.

In RAM-storage, in a pinch you can simply walk through your RAM to find the data you need, if you do that on a HD, you can go out and get yourself a coffee (and a donut or a toasted bagel) and return before your data is found.

CountZero

"If you have four groups working on a compiler, you'll get a 4-pass compiler." - Conway's Law

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