Re: How to efficiently make an "history" ?

Harlan Messinger wrote:

> "--CELKO--" <joe.celko_at_trilogy.com> wrote in message
> news:7e67a7b3.0108292023.7f6e3c68_at_posting.google.com...
> > >> Here is the target: we want to be able to have a list of fields
> > (Name, escription, age, city, ...) describing an entity. The number of
> > fields is not fixed and can be quite large. <<
> >
> > First of all, please post DDL and not personal narratives or
> > pseudo-code. Secondly, SQL has no "fields" -- tables are made of
> > rows, rows are made of columns and columns hold values. This is
> > important!!
>
> Why? "Rows" and "columns" are the standard terms in SQL-speak, but "records"
> and "fields" are venerable, well-understood generic terms, not likely to
> cause confusion.

Records and fields connote 2 dimensional thinking. Attributes (columns) and tuples (rows) connote three dimensional thinking; that is, relations (tables) relate to other relations usually through the primary key / foreign key relationship. Records and files relate much better to COBOL programming than database programming. Received on Fri Aug 31 2001 - 02:50:38 CEST