Can SOLID support Relations?

gisborne · February 23, 2020, 7:12pm

The philosophy behind SOLID is great, except that I don’t see any story about employing relations (as in “relational database”).

I’m not talking SQL; just the relational algebra. If I could fluently work with relations over values including triples and anything else, SOLID is a complete solution for accessing data. Without it, I would have to go outside SOLID to do many kinds of real work.

I get that triples can technically represent anything you can with relations, but it’s beyond klunky.

I can easily conceive of elegant ways to provide the relational algebra within SOLID.

Have I missed something? Is there a plan to support relations?

happybeing · February 23, 2020, 9:31pm

You’re quite right, this is a significant omission, and possibly one reason that industry has devoted it’s efforts to property graphs and not picked up RDF.

The good news is that there appears to be growing recognition of this limitation and I hope ongoing work to address it. For example search for RDF* (RDF star) and SPARQL*.