TransRelational model

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The TransRelational™ model (TRM) is the patented design of Stephen A. Tarin, CEO of Required Technologies Inc., for implementing database management systems. Although to date it has only been used to implement a prototype of an analytics-only columnar data store, relational database pioneer and longtime company insider Chris Date believes it is suitable for implementing the relational data model. Indeed, he claims that the TRM is likely to be the most significant advance in the database field since Edgar F. Codd invented the relational model itself.

The course description for Chris Date's "Go Faster!: The TransRelational™ Approach to DBMS Implementation" lists the following features and supposed benefits of the TransRelational approach:

The data is effectively stored in many different sort orders at the same time.
The data occupies a fraction of the space required for a conventional database today.
Indexes and other conventional access paths are completely unnecessary.
Optimization is much simpler than it is with conventional systems; often, there is just one obviously best way to implement any given relational operation. In particular, the need for cost-based optimizing is eliminated.
There is no need to compile database requests ahead of time for performance.
Join performance is linear—meaning, in effect, that the time it takes to join twenty relations is only twice the time it takes to join ten (loosely speaking). It also means that joining twenty relations, if necessary, is feasible in the first place; in other words, the system is scalable.
Logical design can be done properly (in particular, there is never any need to "denormalize for performance").
Physical database design can be completely automated.
Database reorganization as conventionally understood is completely unnecessary.
In general, far fewer human decisions are needed.

It should be stressed that the above bullet points are from a marketing document, and none of these claims have been proven.

Regarding the origin of the "TransRelational" name, a poster at http://www.dbms2.com/2005/10/10/17/ going by the name of "Al" wrote on May 29, 2006, "I chuckle every time I see the term 'TransRelational' — I came up with it, trying to combine its promise with the high-tech-sounding Star Trek TransWarp term."

1 Technical details
2 Commercial implementation
3 Notes
4 See also
5 External links

[edit] Technical details

Apart from Appendix A (pp 941-966) of Chris Date's An Introduction to Database Systems, Eighth Edition^[1], the best published technical details of the TransRelational model are the three relevant United States patents held by Steve Tarin, the inventor of the TRM:

[edit] Commercial implementation

Very little information is publicly available about Required Technologies Inc. or its commercial implementation of the TRM. The following details were taken from the resume of former Required Technologies employee Vincent Poydenot:

Required Technologies, Inc.; New York, NY; Apr 2000 - Nov 2001

Required Technologies' mission was to create a breakthrough database core technology in order to revolutionize the ever-mounting data industry. Experts supporting this new technology and working with us included Dr. E.F. Codd (inventor of the relational model), Dr. Michael Stonebraker (founder of Ingres Corp.) and C.J. Date (technical writer and author).

Vice President-Software Development
Reported to CEO, as Chief Software Architect and Lead Developer.

At the very early stage of the company, deeply involved in the research, development and validation of the core technology prototype (in memory and disk based systems) based on the original patent (Ref: US Patent 6,009,432).

Demonstrated and marketed the power and potential of the technology to private investors, venture capitalists (SVIC, Morgenthaler), potential customers and partners (VISA USA Inc., Yahoo) and 3rd party vendors (SPSS) for fund raising and strategic alliances.

Ramped up and led the development team by migrating a limited number of research programmers experimenting on a prototype version, to a full scale production department implementing a highly sophisticated commercial database system suite.

Directed all software development activities for 15-member team for the main commercial software application suite (NT 2000/4.0, low-level VC++, STL, highly multithreaded, assembly optimization), including complex port to Unix (Linux / Solaris 64 bits).

In the above-referenced article, "DEFENDING THE TRANSRELATIONAL™ MODEL", Ken O'Flaherty describes the commercial implementation of the TRM by Required Technologies as a full-blown, disk-based, updatable RDBMS with standard SQL, ODBC, JDBC, third-party tool interfaces, and all standard subsystems.

On September 6, 2006, Nathan Myers offered this nugget: "I don’t know from TRM, but I wrote the original code for RT (Required Technologies) to implement their on-disk storage: essentially, a journaled filesystem. I can say with authority that it was optimized for sequential reads and append-only writes. I doubt that fact actually settles anything, but at least it’s a fact. I’m partial to facts." (See http://www.dbms2.com/2005/10/10/17/ .)