SQL for Web Nerds
by Philip Greenspun
After writing a preface lampooning academic eggheads who waste a lot of ink placing the relational database management system (RDBMS) in the context of 50 years of database management software, how does this book start? With a chapter placing the RDBMS in the context of other database management software.
Why? You ought to know why you're paying the huge performance, financial, and administration cost of an RDBMS. This chapter doesn't dwell on mainframe systems that people stopped using in the 1970s, but it does cover the alternative approaches to data management taken by Web sites that you've certainly visited and perhaps built.
The architect of any new information system must decide how much responsibility for data management the new custom software should take and how much should be left to packaged software and the operating system. This chapter explains what kind of packaged data management software is available, covering files, flat file database management systems, the RDBMS, object-relational database management systems, and object databases. This chapter also introduces the SQL language.
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