Re: How to model searchable properties of an entity

"pstnotpd" <schoenmakers_at_tpd.tno.nl> wrote in message news:cft046$627$1_at_voyager.news.surf.net...

> I think Dilips main problem is trying to get an OO mindset translated to
> relational. Did we ever hear what kind of DB he's actually using?
>

In the original question Dilip mentioned the alternative of storing each attribute in a column of its own. That sure sounds like SQL and relational to me. I guess I sort of took it for granted from that point on. But, now that you mention it, I don't recall him directly saying.

Trying to reconcile the OO mindset and the relational mindset is a quandary that professionals have faced tens of thousands of times in the last 14 years or so. I have tried to describe each of these two mindsets to both camps more than once in public forums ( forums =fora ?). I usually simplify each description to the point where the mindset's adherents think my description is caricature. And each group tends think of the other group as some malignant mixture of crazy, stupid, ignorant, and evil.

This is actually a very common reaction when two cultures meet.

I usually end up with everybody mad at me, and ready to roast me. I'm a little hesitant to try it again.

> I for one would be really interested in another way of doing this
> without having to define a load of tables or 1 table with a load of
> columns which will be mostly NULL by nature.

What's wrong with "a load of tables"? If each table relates to a "proposition" expressed as a "relation", then if you have a lot of propositions, perhaps you ought to have a lot of tables.

It continues to baffle me why people think that terabytes of data is "not complex", but a hundred tables or so is beyond human comprehension. But that probably reflects the fact that I'm closer to the "data centric" mindset than I am to the OO mindset. Received on Tue Aug 17 2004 - 16:33:43 CEST