NoSQL RDBMS, Copyright (C) 1998 Carlo Strozzi, with permission from the original RDB author, W.Hobbs.
This program comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY; for details refer to the GNU General Public License.
A copy of the GNU General Public License is included in the appendix, at the end of this document.
This working draft describes, and provides instructions for the use of, NoSQL (I personally like to pronounce it noseequel), a close derivative of the RDB DataBase system. The original RDB system was (and still is) developed at RAND Organization by Walter V. Hobbs. Most of the NoSQL code, as well as the text of this document, have been taken directly from RDB, so most of the credit for it goes to the original author.
NoSQL uses exactly the same table format as RDB, and therefore tables are called 'rdbtables' also in the NoSQL context.
NoSQL's major differences over the original code are:
http://admin.gnacademy.org:8001/HyperNews/get/tech/dbedit.html
Other major contributors to the original RDB system, besides the author, were:
Chuck Bush
Don Emerson
Judy Lender
Roy Gates Rae Starr
A good question one could ask is "With all the relational database management systems available today, why do we need another one ?" There are five reasons. They are:
The data is contained in regular UNIX ASCII files, and so can be manipulated by regular UNIX utilities, e.g. ls, wc, mv, cp, cat, more, less, editors like 'vi', head, RCS, etc.
The form of each file of data is that of a relation, or table, with rows and columns of information.
To extract information, a file of data is fed to one or more "operators" via the UNIX Input/Output redirection mechanism.
There are also programs to generate reports, and to generate, modify, and validate the data. A more through discussion of why this type of relational database structure makes sense is found in the book, "UNIX Relational Database Management", Reference #2.
It is assumed that the reader has at least a minimum knowledge of the UNIX Operating System, including knowledge of Input/Outout redirection (e.g., STDIN, STDOUT, pipes).
This document presents information in the following order: The DATA section describes the structure of the data, with examples. There is a general discussion about operators in the section on OPERATORS, followed by several sub-sections, one for each operator in alphabetic order. Each has detailed instructions for use, and examples. There are sections describing selection of information using multiple operators, producing reports, and generating new rdbtables (data files in NoSQL format).