Re: database systems and organizational intelligence

Your comment below is a joke, I hope.

A functional dependency is a property of the SEMANTICS or MEANING of the attributes. It occurs at the "business" level. It is something that business people can tell you. Like (a not perfect example, but easy to understand): Each person in our company has a Social Security Number, and each Social Security Number (SSN) identifies one and only one person. So, in the miniworld of our company, we know that the value of an employee's SSN uniquely determines the employee's name. Before any entities or tables are created, before any code is written. A functional dependency is a constraint between two sets of attributes within the miniworld of the database (our company).

"Functional" in this context means "unique". It has nothing to do with functions as you are thinking of them.

It has zero, nothing, nada, zip to do with code. Nothing at all. Nothing.

  The word
> "functional" is another clue that when we are working with data, we are
also
> working with functions. Data + Functions = Code? (all terms would need
to
> be more precise for that to be meaningful, I realize).
>
Received on Wed May 26 2004 - 11:52:23 CDT