Two of my esteemed colleagues have this way of saying something that has had me thinking that either they are misinformed or I have missed something, or they have transformed something into something else somehow. There are occasions when they will be working with Microsoft SQL Server and say “I’m doing it the relational way” or “I have to do it the relational way” or something along those lines. It kinda makes me say to myself I’ll code CSharpy in C#, or I’ll swim swimmingly in the pool. The ambiguity is bad because you would expect a DBA to understand what they are saying is not entirely correct, and because they say it the way they do it makes you wonder how credible they are with regards to other database (relational way) aspects.

If you do a search on wikipedia for Microsoft SQL Server you will note that the first line in the wiki entry states:

Microsoft SQL Server is a relational model database server produced by Microsoft. Its primary query languages are T-SQL and ANSI SQL.

Note the keyword relational. I knew this of course because my understanding was that Microsoft SQL Server is a relational database management system (RDBMS) and that implies that it uses the relational model created by a guy called E.F. Codd (Not sure if my colleagues know this). Oracle, SQLLite, MySql and PostGreSQL are all considered RDBMS software, thus it implies you are doing things in a ‘relational way’. There is a whole list of RDBMS’s on wikipedia as well. The way my colleagues say “they are doing it the relational way” makes me think that they have some other structure that they use, such as hierarchical or network databases, which work in a completely different way to the relational model. Or perhaps they have rewritten the SQL Server kernel in some way. Wikipedia also has an article explaining the relational model, and the article makes mention of alternatives to the relational model.

This has been bugging me for a while and just thought I might make a post about it.