IDC looks at the Associative Model of Data. (Database News and Products).

The IDC opinion reflected on the need for combining data from multiple sources, the managing of data over time, and support for the semantic rules governing the data as both the data and its definitional characteristics change.

`Yet,' continues the report, `relational database management systems are inherently limited in their ability to provide such support.' It was this realisation that prompted Simon Williams to found Lazy Software, the developer of Sentences, an innovative database management system written in Java and based on the Associative Model of Data. According to IDC, `Sentences appears to offer clear benefits in a number of key areas of data management that are not especially well served by relational or object-relational DBMS technology.' It concludes, `Sentences represents the rebirth of an old idea; that databases are about more than just storing and retrieving structured data, but are about maintaining repositories of useful information and recombining it in different ways to make it even more useful. Relational DBMSs are not set up to handle such a task.'

Comment:

Sentences is the world's first commercial implementation of the associative model of data, and the only database architecture designed to reflect the structure of data in the real world and the way that our brains perceive and process information. As well as rapid development and deployment, and the security and scalability required by modem database management systems, the associative model of data provides many other unique capabilities.