Unlearning the Relational Model

Thanks to a Google Alert I stumbled into this interesting post entitled The Content Imperative:  Unlearning the Relational Model in another CEO blog, that of Joel Amoussou of Montreal-based Efasoft.

Says Joel:

relational data

• Content is created to be human readable
  
• Content can be rendered in multiple presentation formats such as print, web, and wireless devices. Therefore it is very important to cleanly separate content from presentation
  
• Content can have an inherent deep hierarchical structure. For example, think about the book/part/chapter/section/subsection/paragraph hierarchy
  
• The relationships between content items are expressed through hierarchical containment and hyperlinks
  
• Content is often mixed (in the sense of mixed content in XML). For example inside a paragraph, some words are italicized, in bold, or underlined to indicate special meaning
  
• Content can have multi-valued properties such as the authors of a document. Multi-valued properties are not supported by SQL.

He continues, starting an argument in favor of XML:

RDBMSweb 2.0

And goes on to discuss XQuery:

The relational data model is based on set theory and predicate logic. Data is represented as n-ary relations and manipulated with relational algebra. CMS vendors and even standard bodies have tried to fork SQL in order to support hierarchies and multi-value properties. It is clear however that XQuery is a superior alternative, specifically designed to address those content-related concerns.

And then finally argues in favor of XML databases over a JCR repository when dealing with large amounts of content:

I couldn't agree more. (Hey, I think I like this guy).  The post also includes some discussion of data vs. content modeling and some interesting parallel history between SGML/XML and the RDBMS.