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From: pbrazier@cosmos-uk.co.uk (Paul)
Newsgroups: comp.databases.theory
Subject: Re: Help!  I can't support normalization
Date: 20 Nov 2002 04:07:29 -0800
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Lauri Pietarinen <lauri.pietarinen@atbusiness.com> wrote in message news:<3DDA5DFD.6020503@atbusiness.com>...
> >
> >
> >I'm often having to programatically create tables containing integers
> >1 to 100 say, it would be good if this was built-in so I could just do
> >"SELECT integer FROM domain_integer WHERE integer BETWEEN 1 AND 100".
...
> 
> It proposes a table called TableNum with just one column containing 
> integers from 1 to ....
> It also has some proposed applications.
> 
> Now, would such a table be a virtual or a real one??

Well, it depends what you man by "real". In a sense all tables are
virtual because they are purely logical constructs. But what would it
mean say to delete a row from such a "domain relation"? Really it
shouldn't be allowed.

I guess what you're meaning is that we would have two categories of
table: ones where the rows are listed explicitly and ones where the
rows are defined in some kind of induction process. These second sort
of tables you could only SELECT from, as INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE might
not make sense. Or maybe they  would? Say I wanted to change my
integer domain to be all integers (within a certain range) excluding
"13"? Should I be allowed to do this or should the "built-in" domains
remain as they are and I should define a new domain based on, but
separate to, the integer domain (type inheritance?)?

I've only briefly read about them but is this moving towards things
like constraint databases?

Does this violate Codd's principles? Should all relations be able in
theory to be manipulated by any SQL DML statement?

Paul.
