Reply to Message
and it's modern day equivalents of UniData and UniVerse, both owned by IBM, is that the database engine doesn't enforce those pesky little rules like data typing. To the database, a field is a field. It doesn't care if you try to plug someone's name into a quantity field. Sure, you can enforce data typing rules in your application, but what happens when someone else writes code that directly accesses the database without going through already written business logic? Because the database engine leaves all, and I do mean all, thinking to the application code the database is able to "outperform" most relational database management systems. As always though, there is a high price that comes with this performance. I've always thought that multi value databases were a good fit for XML, but not for anything that requires any kind of data integrity.
The best of ZDNet, delivered
ZDNet Newsletters
Get the best of ZDNet delivered straight to your inbox
