Re: Relational and multivalue databases

"Dave Rolsky" <autarch_at_urth.org> wrote in message news:Pine.LNX.4.58.0402220049490.29913_at_urth.org...
> On Thu, 19 Feb 2004, Dawn M. Wolthuis wrote:
>
> > How do you decide whether info is a sub-table of an existing table or
should
> > go in its own table? If the information is functionally dependent. My
> > phone numbers are information that one might think of as being in the
> > relationship between me and the telecom industry. But my phone numbers
have
> > no meaning apart from me -- sure they are phone numbers that exist in
the
> > world, but the point of capturing the data is to capture information
about a
> > person. So, don't stick them in some other function (aka file) -- put
them
> > with the person, even if there are more than one of them.
>
> So you've never encountered two people who share the same phone number?
>
> -dave

Sure, but what do you want to do, Dave -- get a random identifier for each phone number and then since people have more than one have a link tabke that links people with each of the keys to their phone numbers? I guess that might make sense to someone in the RDBMS world, but step back a minute and look that -- the not-terribly-technical-term "silly" comes to my mind.

smiles. --dawn Received on Sun Feb 22 2004 - 16:05:05 CET