Re: Pizza Example

In message <c0e3f26e.0404160207.2c446825_at_posting.google.com>, Tony <andrewst_at_onetel.net.uk> writes
>"Anthony W. Youngman" <wol_at_thewolery.demon.co.uk> wrote in message
>news:<3liqSxG8WvfAFw3H_at_thewolery.demon.co.uk>...
>> It's all very well saying data about my fingers (of which I have ten) is
>> different from data about me (of which there is only one), but by
>> storing the data in different tables, the database has lost the
>> information that the fingers and the rest of me are all one thing.
>
>You still persist in believing that nonsense about "losing
>information" by decomposing data? This just reflects your ignorance
>of how an RDBMS works, and it is time you rectified that.

It happens in the scientific world all the time. Why should the data world be any different?

Let's decompose you to find out what you consist of, shall we? Oops, we've just killed you! That's a hell of a lot of information lost. And every time we dig deeper, we lose information about the level we've just pulled apart.

Yes, you CAN try to analyse and store that information, but you CANNOT do it in Science - entropy is a one-way-street. If you treat a database as an exercise in Pure Maths, I might agree with you, but as soon as you drag the real world into it (and if you don't, what's the *point* of a database), you have to deal with entropy.

Cheers,
Wol

-- 
Anthony W. Youngman - wol at thewolery dot demon dot co dot uk
HEX wondered how much he should tell the Wizards. He felt it would not be a
good idea to burden them with too much input. Hex always thought of his reports
as Lies-to-People.
The Science of Discworld : (c) Terry Pratchett 1999