Re: Is supertyping orthadox?

Hi Brett,

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.
>
> Your design sounds completely orthodox, theirs is completely weinie.
>
> Read any book on relational design, for gosh sakes. If their design
> made any kind of sense, databases wouldn't let you define your own
> tables. Sheesh.
>
> J.

Completely agree with this. I can only think of one reason why these people would coem up with this weird idea, and that would be a completely false conception of the relation between the programming environment and the database. There are sound solutions to link these two, however.

So, fire them. For any ideas about linking databases to OO languages (if that 's the point), you might want to try my favorite starting point, which is Scott Ambler's work: http://www.ambysoft.com/onlineWritings.html Perhaps more relevant to your current issue is the paper 'Crossing Chasms' at http://hometown.aol.com/kgb1001001/index.html This page also gives links to some commercial products.

Hope this is helpful.

Ruud de Koter Received on Wed Mar 21 2001 - 08:51:08 CET