Being one of the few with "women's intuition" who speak up on this list ;-)
I'll add to it that I really, truly did dream that a person was dead and
awoke to hear that they were.  So, even if you don't take my intuition
seriously, I do.  smiles.  --dawn
P.S.  Even if someone has a hunch with no backing whatsoever (which is not
the case here), it is a good idea to find a way to test out such a hunch,
right?

Yes, what I should have said was that it was implementations of the
relational model that should be retired.  However, a theory about mass
murderers that isn't the best at solving such crimes is not the theory I
would want to employ.  So, I think is not a huge stretch to suggest we
retire the relational model for the purpose of modeling data to be stored
and retrieved in databases.

smiles.  --dawn

Thank you, thank you for actually addressing the question, Dan!

If we had an initial set of requirements, a single change to those
requirements prior to the implementation and three changes after the initial
setup, would that be sufficient for such a competition?  One of the
post-implementation requirements changes would be the one related to your
last statement.

After the initial implementations, an independent group would then do ad hoc
queries of various types and we would determine the skillsets required to
complete each query.  However, any that require training of the end-users or
where experience really counts might need some pre-trained users???

This one is difficult to determine what to measure.  We could view the
entire collection of implementations as a distributed set of data, but then
if implementation A is better (by whatever measures we include) at
aggregating data across all disperate data sources, what does that say about
data model or even database implementation A?  What if database A is not
involved in the solution any more than database B?  It would say that team
A's overall solution "won" in this part of the competition, but it might say
nothing about data model A, right?

These are quite implementation-specific criteria, but if all n
implementations of a specific model "lose" to all of another model, then I
guess it does relate to the usefulness of the model, as performance in
general does.

If the solution developed by any team yields a lack of data integrity
according to the constraints indicated in the requirements, that would
surely detract from that team's score.  It is quite likely that all teams
will end up developing rather tight solutions in this regard, however, don't
you think?

Would a "pet store" application be a sufficient as a basis for the
competition, or is there something more rigorous that would yield a more
convincingly serious competition?

Perhaps having 5 databases that are considered to be RDBMS's and 5 that are
not based on the relational model would be a good start?  For the RDBMS's --
Oracle, DB2, SQL Server, and which others?  Informix, Sybase, MySQL?  For
non-relational, we could have a MUMPS implementation -- Cache, a PICK
implementation such as UniVerse, an OO implementation -- which one? an
XML-DB such as Berkeley XML-DB or ? an implementation tied to a particular
vertical market such as that with metadata.com ?  an implementation such as
the e4graph just announced here ... a hierarchical such as IMS, others?

Yup.  --dawn

If you expect reason from Dawn, you will be disappointed.

playing usenet catchup while on the road...

Yes, I recognize that this is similar to any bake-off competition
where it very well could be that the best recipe doesn't win.
Perhaps:
1) This particular instance of using the recipe is less than the norm
2) The judges were looking for qualities that do not translate into
getting the best recipe, but merely the best of some attribute (they
might be big on texture, for example)
3) "Best" is too subjective or cannot be generalized from this one
example.

Also, even if the judges do pick "the best" that doesn't necessarily
lead to better industry acceptance -- if the judges choose a snake
dish as the best, that will not get everyone to start eating snake,
for example.  But a film that wins the oscar for best picture is
likely to have more people check it out and form their own opinion.

It isn't easy to figure out how to get emperical data comparing
implementations of data models, much less the models themselves, but I
think it is important to pursue.  We have read about the mathematics
of the relational model, but where is the scientific evidence of its
usefulness?

It is not that the relational model gives us nothing, but a model is
simply a metaphor and the relational metaphor "seems" not nearly as
rich as the web metaphor, for example (the web being better modeled as
a di-graph).  Relational theorists typically consider "navigation" and
hierarchies as bad but such concepts are apparently not bad enough to
keep the web of data that forms the www from evolving as a highly
useful huge distributed data repository.

Many of my concerns with the relational model could be issues with the
implementations of the relational model because of the brittle nature
of many applications built on current RDBMS's.  That is where I have
no emperical data but many snippets of anecdotal evidence.  Intuition
is not the same as randomly choosing an opinion.  That is why I'm
trying to get some facts -- because after years of experiencing a
variety of information systems techniques & tools, both my gut and my
pocketbook tell me that the PICK approach (which is old, I realize,
but as a data model it is revived with XML) has a lot to offer the
industry.

Relational proponents often give the impression that their model is
beyond reproach because it is based on mathematics.  I might believe
in a triune God, but I sure wouldn't claim that the reason is because
we can come up with a mathematical model/metaphor for such a theory.
Other theories can have mathematical models too.  I checked around in
the Pick world and Henry Eggers told me that his guess was that if
anyone had worked on putting a mathematical model to PICK it would
have been him and he had done very little in that regard.  So, I've
done a little work on that, simply to show that "relational" is not
the only approach that has been implemented for which there is a
mathematical model.

Additionally, relational theorists will often agree that other models
could also be based on mathematics, but they make the not-at-all
mathematical statement that it is somehow clear to them that relations
are the simplest construct with which to model data so it is clearly
the best.  [I'm a bit tired right now so the following might be a poor
analogy -- but are the unitarians obviously right since they can
"model God" with a geometric point where the trinitarians model God
with a triangle?]  When looking at a proposition or predicate, it is
more likely that a person would model it with a tree (remember
diagramming sentences?) than with relations.  Is that relevant?  I'm
not sure, but I think so.

So, yes, I, too, want something more than intuition for my claim that
it is time to retire (or at least significantly enhance) the
relational model as it seems to have an undeserved king-of-the-hill
reputation.  Any insights from others are definitely appreciated.
Cheers!  --dawn