Re: FK -> non PK - bad design?

From: Larry Coon <larry_at_assist.org>
Date: Fri, 11 Apr 2003 10:04:40 -0700
Message-ID: <3E96F5A8.6938_at_assist.org>


--CELKO-- wrote:

> Yes, but what you really want is often a collective noun or other name
> that tells the reader this is a set. Example: Employee = bad;
> Employees = better; Personnel = good.

See my other posts in this thread for my argument about "employee" vs. "employees." As for "personnel" being better still, I personally wouldn't assume the word "personnel" means the same thing as "employee" for a given entity, so I certainly wouldn't assume it's good. It may be very bad. For instance, the entity can have personnel who are not employees. The only reason I can see to prefer "personnel" is that it isn't a word which changes if the collection is singular or plural, but in my opinion, picking that word based solely on that criterion is a cop-out.

> No, because the values of a COLUMN (not a "record" -- totally
> different concept!) are scalars. Saying "employee_names" would mean
> that you have crowded several names in one column, in violation of
> First Normal Form.

So you're arguing that we can know from context (it's in a column in a normalized database) that it's a scalar, but you won't accept similar contextual info (it's in a table, which by definition represents a set) to know that the set can contain more than one element, even if the set has a singular name?

Larry Coon
University of California
larry_at_assist.org
and lmcoon_at_home.com Received on Fri Apr 11 2003 - 19:04:40 CEST

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