RE: Lazy Software

> From: Smith Neil (Newton) [mailto:Neil_Smith@newton.co.uk]
> Has anyone looked at a new product called 'Sentences' from a small UK
> company called Lazy Software (www.lazysoft.com)?

I've studied it in some depth.  There's a free trial download available from
their Web site that's well worth a look; it's got a very clean interface.
Written in Java, and highly portable.  Personal edition only at the moment,
and I suspect they'll have problems scaling the current system up to
enterprise levels.

> It is based on something called the 'Associative Model of 
> data' and a 'new' concept called a 'Triple Store'.

They also have a patent on the underlying storage model --- quite an
interesting patent to read, as it concerns how to expose a triples model and
still get tolerable performance by storing sets of related triples.  I'm
still musing on whether there's prior art.

> It is claimed to be a great advance on relational databases, 
> requiring only two tables for a database.

That's the same claim as for any other triple store... one table for node
definitions, one for arcs.  It's like the comparison between multiple CSV
files versus XML as data transfer mechanisms --- you get more flexibility
using XML.

		- Peter

Received on Friday, 2 November 2001 04:46:26 UTC