Re: A Normalization Question

> Try again. There is no proposition in "brown." There
> is one in "The string 'brown' is composed of the symbols
> 'b', 'r', 'o', 'w' and 'n' in that order," but that's
> not what you're storing in the db. If you don't
> understand basic logic, you're going to have a hard
> time with DB theory. Oh, wait....

'brown' is equivalent to 'brown is composed to b, r, o, w, n'. Test it out with a reasonably old child. If you are thinking that propositions does exist because someone hasn't laid it out in a sentence format for you, then you are as limited as RM which needs that sentence to be laid out in attribute values of tuples before declaring a proposition exists.

See C.J. Dates "Intro to Db Sys", 6th Ed, Chapter 19, Section 5, p560 Further Topics / Relation-Valued Attributes, where he discusses the concept of values being relations: "as we explained that such 'scalars' can have a structure of arbitrary complexity when viewed at a lower level of abstraction and we mentioned that they might even be relations. In other words, we can have domains, and therefore attributes, that are relation-valued, and thus have relations that contain other relations inside themseleves and so on recursively to any levels. TM/XDb1 implements this concept. Received on Sun Jul 18 2004 - 08:09:26 CEST