[Info-vax] Should Oracle buy OpenVMS?

[Richard B. Gilbert]

Bill Gunshannon wrote:
> In article <49efc743$0$90271$14726298 at news.sunsite.dk>,
> 	Arne Vajhøj <arne at vajhoej.dk> writes:
>> Bill Gunshannon wrote:
>>> In article <49ee7768$0$90272$14726298 at news.sunsite.dk>,
>>> 	Arne Vajhøj <arne at vajhoej.dk> writes:
>>>> Alan Winston - SSRL Central Computing wrote:
>>>>> I'd heard it was pushing up into the high-end web space, although presumably
>>>>> more for things like high-speed display of data (news aggregation, etc) than
>>>>> for transaction-dependent things directly involving money.
>>>> MySQL show up a lot pf places. It is actually an OK database.
>>> Database experts would likely disagree.  Thankfully, we dropped it here
>>> in favor of Postgres.  Specifically because it lacked certain features
>>> of real databases that needed to be taught and couldn't with MySQL.
>> What features?
> 
> I am not a database expert so I could be wrong but one thing that I
> seem to remember was someting called "constraints"  and some kind of
> "integrity".  There were a number of things that real databases had
> that MySQL not only didn't have but had no intention of adding.
> 
> bill
> 

Referential integrity is probably what you are thinking of.  A database 
with referential integrity will not allow you to enter, say, a sale 
unless there is a customer record for the customer.  Some databases can 
enforce referential integrity.  If you are going to do it, you should do 
it from the beginning; trying to fix it later can be anything from a 
nightmare to an impossibility!