Re: A Normalization Question

> There would never be a relation called "THINGS" containing the attributes in
> the way you infer.

Sure there would because even attributes are things. Everything is a thing. It is possible for an attribute to have attributes and thus the attribute with respect to its attributes becomes a thing. For example, 'brown' can have the attribute language whose value(s) could be english, spanish, etc.

> In normalization, one does not consider the values of the attributes, only
> the semantics of the relationships among them.

If one chooses to ignore some things (ie 'brown', 'brown', 'brown'), then one has a limited understanding/implementation of normalization.

> The fact that a name, street, color, and anything other attribute has the
> value of "Brown" has absolutely zero, nada, zip, zilch to do with
> normalization or redundancy. Nothing at all.

If the string 'brown' has the attribute language, it would be stored three times, each having the same value. Changing the third 'brown's language (ie to western english), would create an update anomaly thus proving that things weren't normalized. Received on Tue Jul 06 2004 - 19:21:00 CEST