Re: A Normalization Question

From: Larry Coon <lcnospam_at_assist.org>
Date: Wed, 07 Jul 2004 14:23:55 -0700
Message-ID: <40EC69EB.723F@assist.org>

Tony wrote:

> You are of course confusing logical and physical issues - and your
> issue is absurd in any case. It is not LOGICALLY redundant to record
> that "Car X is brown" and "Dog Y is brown", because these are two
> different facts. You are presumably saying that it is PHYSICALLY
> redundant to store the 5 characters of "brown" twice on the disk, and
> so you want to physically store the word "brown" once and then point
> to it many times.

You couldn't do that -- if more than one thing POINTS to "brown," then the pointers are stored redundantly. Infinite regress rears its ugly head.

So in Neo's world, any attribute (eg: "brown") can only appear once in the entire database. Got a brown car and a brown dog? Tough -- Neo's dbms can't handle that.

Larry Coon
University of California Received on Wed Jul 07 2004 - 16:23:55 CDT