> Joins are what makes relational modeling interesting!
It is the central part of RM which is difficult to model using other methods and which requires high expertise in non-trivial use cases. One alternative to how multiple tables can be analyzed without joins is proposed in the concept-oriented model [1] which relies on two equal modeling constructs: sets (like RM) and functions. In particular, it is implemented in the Prosto data processing toolkit [2] and its Column-SQL language [3]. The idea is that links between tables are used instead of joins. A link is formally a function from one set to another set.
[2] https://github.com/asavinov/prosto data processing toolkit radically changing how data is processed by heavily relying on functions and operations with functions - an alternative to map-reduce and join-groupby
It is the central part of RM which is difficult to model using other methods and which requires high expertise in non-trivial use cases. One alternative to how multiple tables can be analyzed without joins is proposed in the concept-oriented model [1] which relies on two equal modeling constructs: sets (like RM) and functions. In particular, it is implemented in the Prosto data processing toolkit [2] and its Column-SQL language [3]. The idea is that links between tables are used instead of joins. A link is formally a function from one set to another set.
[1] Joins vs. Links or Relational Join Considered Harmful https://www.researchgate.net/publication/301764816_Joins_vs_...
[2] https://github.com/asavinov/prosto data processing toolkit radically changing how data is processed by heavily relying on functions and operations with functions - an alternative to map-reduce and join-groupby
[3] Column-SQL https://prosto.readthedocs.io/en/latest/text/column-sql.html