Re: Help! I can't support normalization

"Jan Hidders" <hidders_at_REMOVE.THIS.uia.ua.ac.be> wrote in message news:3dc2b633$1_at_news.uia.ac.be...
> Rowan wrote:
> >[....] When I asked the programmer for help, he said just concatenate the
> >names in the field in the employee table and call it "name". I said no.
> >He asked why.
>
> Because you may want separate indices on the first and the last name. This
> may be the case if somwhere in your WHERE clauses you only compare to the
> first name or only to the last name. If this is not the case then you have
> to wonder if as far as the database is concerned the whole name should be
> considered atomic and then this would in fact not be a normalization
> problem.
>
> -- Jan Hidders

And not only an optimization issue. If searching for only lastname, one have to construct the WHERE clause using some SUBSTRING function which can be a bit of a mess if the name is for instance "Zack Michael de la Rocha" (a bit of ad lib there).

--
Tibor Karaszi