Re: Design shift of view

["James W. Kilgore" <qappdsn@xxxxxxx>]

Mark Lazarus wrote:

>  Why would you want to get rid of the record concept?  For most business
> processing, record processing is very efficient.
>
>

Within an application you could still retain the "record" concept, if that's 
what
you still want to call it, as a collection of variables to perform a unit of 
work.

IMO, some of the problems we have currently are with the underlying physical
arrangement of information which is still based upon "unit record" design.

But that's not even the heart of it, imagine if you will, a program that does 
not
have any file definitions, just the variables needed for the task at hand, and 
yet
could perform requests of information.  We can do that now.  If we did, we could
have total separation from the logic of the program and the physical retrieval 
if
information.  If the retrieval/storage method underwent a radical shift, the 
only
programs requiring change would be the layer between the application program and
the retrieval mechanism.

Even this is still within the confines of a RDBMS which operates under a static
definition of "records" and the program must include data gathering logic.  If 
the
data base became "live" instead of "static" a whole slug of logistical problems
would disappear,  if the data gathering logic were shifted to the data, one 
would
care less about the arrangement of data and could concentrate on the purpose of
the program, I would even go so far as to say that the program would no longer
need be static.


James W. Kilgore
qappdsn@ibm.net

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