Re: Expressing SQL in relational algebra

> If you read the Loves/Hates example I suggested to Neo earlier and
> took the time to read up on _The Principle of Orthogonal Design_, you
> would see that Date and McGoveran discourage the use of the relation
> name (in this case L) to encode information. Instead of a binary
> relation with A and B, a better design would use a trinary relation
> along the lines of (Subject, Verb, Object).

I was looking for a systematic way to represent arbitrary relationship(s) between any two arbitrary things in a database. Thus if thing1 is in tableX and thing2 in tableY, I would need to refer to them and the verb via Globally Unique IDs (guid). When traversing the table containing the subject, verb, and object, I would have difficulty in determining what tables the guids were related to. For my application, the _The Principle of Orthogonal Design_ did not provide an acceptable/practical method of representing arbitrary relationships between any two arbitrary things. Received on Mon Apr 07 2003 - 22:03:28 CEST