[plug] setting up Linux server

[Shackleton, Kevin]

I'll buy into this - when is a relational database not a relational
database?

I learnt that a "relation" is a table with the same fields in every record,
and no heirarchy between records.  I also learnt that in a relational
database one establishes "relationships" between tables which define things
like referential integrity.

This terminology is rather confusing.  But I prefer to think of a relational
database as consisting of relations, whether or not it supports
relationships, which the more sophisticated products do.

BTW, I have written a number of commercial databases in Access and have
found that it's a good idea to define relationships between various fields
in the tables but it's not necessarily a good idea to define referential
integrity.  What happens (in Access, where the tables are easily accessable
(there's more confusing terminology!) is that someone decides to manually
delete a record in one table for reasons best known to themselves and they
wonder where the 337 dependant records went in the other table.

K.


> ----------
> From: 	John Summerfield[SMTP:summer at os2.ami.com.au]
> 
> If the DBMS doesn't do this, it's not relational.
>