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It seems this has degraded into an argument about semantics. When I learned the term in school, it was not synonymous with RDBMSes. When I was trying to learn l
by donaq 16y ago
It seems this has degraded into an argument about semantics. When I learned the term in school, it was not synonymous with RDBMSes. When I was trying to learn lisp from the book Practical Common Lisp, there was a chapter containing an example where one went about building a database that resided in memory for the duration of the program's run. At my current job, the app I am writing processes a collection of csv files which my colleagues and I refer to as a database. I don't think the term "database" should be conflated with "database management system", much less a "relational database management system". I mean, nowadays there are so many different types of databases out there other than those (loosely) based on relational algebra.
- RiderOfGiraffes 16y agoThe comment that started this discussion was here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1829481 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1829481 in which it was said: > Yes, there are people out there who ... have never > heard of an inner join. We call them bad programmers. You said: > ... the definition of a database is an organised > collection of data. Ephemeral or transient data is > still data. That's not the point. Your sense of "a database" being "an organised collection of data" is actually more commonly (in my experience) referred to as "a data structure." Usually it's not "a database" until it gets some sort of query language or manipulation primitives. Yes, people refer to a collection of data as "a database," but I return to my original objection to the original comment requiring that not being a bad programmer requires that you know about inner-joins. As I said earlier, we have, to some extent, been talking past each other.