Re: Nearest Common Ancestor Report (XDb1's $1000 Challenge)

On 8 Jun 2004 13:53:18 -0700, Neo wrote:

(snip)
>If you need to hear this from an authority in order to
>accept this common sense idea, see C.J. Date's "An Intro to Database
>Systems", 6th Ed, Chapter 10, Further Normalization I: 1NF, 2NF, 3NF,
>BCNF, pg 280 where he begins with "what is wrong with this design:
>redundancy", "redundancy leads to several problems", "so perhaps a
>good design principle is 'one fact in one place' (ie. avoid
>redundancy). The subject of further normalization is essentially just
>a formalization of simple ideas like this". In the summary of the same
>chapter, he restates "normalization ... the purpose of such reduction
>is to avoid redundancy".

Thanks for a great quote. Please read very carefully what you just copied from Date's work, and this time, try to understand it.

In case you still don't get it: here are the magic words:

>good design principle is 'one fact in one place'

You see? Date wants one ***FACT*** in one place. Could you please be so kind to explain when "brown" did become a fact?

(snip rest of Neo's ramblings)

(from countless other posts by Neo)

>john's color is brown.
>mary isa person.
>mary's color is brown.

Now these are actually very good examples of what is commonly referred to as "facts" - thanks for providing such excellent examples! Please show how the fact "john's color is brown" is stored more than once in any of the implementations I provided.

Best, Hugo

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