Re: In an RDBMS, what does "Data" mean?

From: Eric Kaun <ekaun_at_yahoo.com>
Date: Mon, 14 Jun 2004 16:14:24 GMT
Message-ID: <A9kzc.25514$8n6.13908_at_newssvr31.news.prodigy.com>


"Laconic2" <laconic2_at_comcast.net> wrote in message news:t6adncXPEMhfsVfdRVn-sw_at_comcast.com...
> [...]
> In the recent Pick example, showing an invoice, there's a list of
account
> numbers, and a correlated list of amounts.
> That is, the second amount "goes with" the second account number. But, in
> the earlier pizza pick example we had a list
> of three toppings and an uncorrelated list of three cheeses. Now my
> question is this: how the heck do you know that in one case the two lists
> are correlated and in the other example they are uncorrelated?
>
> Are you "just expected to know" the logical structure of invoices and
> pizzas enough to draw this inference?
> Not that there aren't things you "just have to know" in a schema of
tables,
> but the Pick people treat it as though it's "intuitively obvious". Maybe
to
> an SME, but maybe not to everybody else.

I think the choice of data structure is important, both in terms of correctness and in communication. I see this a lot on Java - people using ArrayList everywhere just because they can, and then doing nausea-inducing searches through the lists, as opposed to using a Set or Bag or some other structure. And besides the simple bad choice, I keep thinking "O how I wish I could do an in-memory SELECT here..." Received on Mon Jun 14 2004 - 18:14:24 CEST

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