Re: Is supertyping orthadox?

JRStern wrote:
>
> On Tue, 20 Mar 2001 12:28:04 -0000, "Brett Gerhardi"
> <brett.gerhardi_at_trinite.co.uk> wrote:
> >We've had initial design discussions with a firm of consultants and during
> >this came up the issue of how do we store the services data.
> >
> >The solution they came up with was what they termed as a 'generic table
> >structure' where basically there is a 'schema' table that stores the Field
> >name, data type, length, (also has a foreign key to a 'tables' table to
> >group the schemas together). Also there is a 'values' table that has a
> >foreign key to the 'schema' table that in the implentation would have a
> >sql_variant field that stored the data.
>
> See if these guys can even recite the definitions of the first three
> normal forms. They can't. Fire them.

Agreed. What they propose sounds like a Pascal variant-record or a C-union. It has no place in relational design.

<snip>

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Kristian Damm Jensen              | Feed the hungry. Go to 
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