Re: organizing tables?

"Marshall Spight" <mspight_at_dnai.com> wrote in message news:OJpQa.56107$H17.18016_at_sccrnsc02...
> Hi all,
>
> I've been thinking about the need for an organization principle for
> relational data. Imagine a dbms that supports many users and many
> applications. After a point, the idea that one has a flat namespace
> for databases within the dbms doesn't seem so nice anymore.

I agree wholeheartedly that there very probably is (or at least would be in a future RDBMS) a need for non-flat namespaces.

> What
> if there are hundreds of databases? What if you want to be able
> to import some of the tables from one database and some from
> another, etc., into your person database?

Logically it is much better to have just one database. Different users can be given different views of this one database, so they might *think* that there is more than one database (assuming two database views are completely isolated), but in the full picture there is just one logical database supported in any single (or distributed) DBMS. A hierarchical (or other) non-flat namespace could facilitate such a system.

> It seems like you need to have some organizing principle. I hate
> to say it, but the popular choice always seems to be a hierarchical
> namespace.
>
> Anyone have any thoughts or are there any interesting prototypes
> out there? It seems like this idea was the 05/25/2003: Quote of the
> Week on dbdebunk.com. (Which is to say, I think they were
> making fun of the idea.)

I'm not aware of any particular work in this area that specifically concerns databases. For me the difficulty would be how much you can make this a model issue. I.e. are there any logical concerns here or is any design little more that a matter of utility?
One angle is that of globally standardised types and databases. A naming scheme should (probably) distinguish between say a standard database of ISO country codes and names, and types and relations created locally by individual users.

Regards
Paul Vernon
Business Intelligence, IBM Global Services Received on Mon Jul 14 2003 - 12:58:25 CEST