Fabian Pascal and Relational Databases:

1A. Can you name the 'truly relational DBMS' that you have mentioned? 1B. Can you tell us anything about this new technology that makes use of true relational technology?

My reference was not to a relational DBMS per se, but rather to a recently developed technology which can be used to build truly relational DBMSs, as well as other software tools. Unfortunately, I am not at liberty to say much about it at this time. What I can say is that the tables in RDBMSs implemented using this technology would truly resemble mathematical sets and would not have the inherent physical ordering of rows and columns that current SQL products impose on tables. It is, of course, up to the industry to use this technology, but given the way in which it operates, I would not hold my breath (see question 4 below).

http://searchdatabase.techtarget.com/tip/0,289483,sid13_gci804576,00.html

eWeek recently published a set of performance values on various databases. Showing that MySQL, Oracle were the fastest and DB2 and SQL Server were the slowest.

http://www.eweek.com/article/0,3658,s=702&a=23115,00.asp

According to Fabian: "Oracle is not a truly and fully relational DBMS, only a SQL one. MySQL is essentially a file manager."

http://searchdatabase.techtarget.com/tip/1,289483,sid13_gci799976,00.html?FromTaxonomy=%2Fpr%2F284872