The Physics of Invoices

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"Anthony W. Youngman" <wol_at_thewolery.demon.co.uk> wrote in message news:H1hmm5EGEfyAFwYZ_at_thewolery.demon.co.uk...
> >> Our problems are solvable when they're chopped; our solutions are
scalable
> >> and provable when they're chopped.
>
> To give a real-world analogy ... try chopping up a hadron. Physicists
> have tried, and it uses up a HELL of a lot of energy to get you nowhere.

The master said to the disciple "Make those ships disappear". And the disciple closed his eyes.

> If you don't know what a hadron is, it's things like protons and
> neutrons - basically, anything made of quarks. You can't chop them up,
> because they put themselves together again ...

If "they put themselves together again" then they were chopped. Have you seen one of those hadrons ?
Are you sure you can use this language (chopping, together) when talking about them ?
They are matter or energy ? :-)

> But when you chop up, say, an invoice, it can't put itself together
> again. Think about it - given a chunk of data that exists in physical
> form (that piece of paper called an invoice) - once you've put it into
> tables in your relational database, how do you get it back out as a
> "chunk" of data. Yep, you can define a view (which I would accept) but
> the purists will say that that isn't relational because views
> (currently) aren't closed. Plus, if you're going to get the order right,
> you've had to convert the original metadata (implicit order) into real
> data and do a sort (both of which I would say is you creating data and
> then providing it upon extraction - so you haven't actually stored the
> invoice properly in the database!
>
> When we put an invoice into a Pick database, the data in the db maps
> CLEANLY to the data on the paper. And the db has all the metadata it
> needs to convert this to a relational view should a user so desire.

Then the laws of Pick World are different from the laws of Relational World.
In the Pick World there are forces that keep an invoice from disintegrating.

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