Let's count beans like a math nerd with a penchant for computers
E.F. Codd's relational database management system.
Lots of relational algebra mumbo-jumbo with Greek letters. Caveperson alternative is the Structured Query Language (SQL):
create table reservations (
flight_number integer,
departure_time datetime,
passenger_name string
);
-- how many folks are on one flight?
select count(*)
from reservations
where flight_number = 37
and departure_time = '2003-02-21 15:00'
Some problems:
- no place to store capacity of the plane that is being used for a particular flight on a particular day
-
what about two passengers with the same name?
-
don't we want to store some info about the passenger? Like whether he is a big fat-ass?
-
now that we've paid $1 million to Oracle or IBM how much efficiency have we gained over our first naive approach?