Re: How to model searchable properties of an entity

On Tue, 17 Aug 2004, Laconic2 wrote:
>
> 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.
>

I am also wondering why many people feel so unformfortable about having may tables. For most OO people, it is quite natural to have many classes, and to have "complex objects" which consist of many "sub-objects". But when it's about a relational model of the data, they say: "Oh look, how complex and clumsy this is - the data is spread over so many tables!"

Seems that there is some psychological problem about it. OO Programmers feel good if they have all their data in a single "object", no matter how complex that objects is and of how many sub-objects it is a kind of "object", so they feel uncomfortable if data is spread over several rows. Joining these rows together appears a clumsy operation to them, though it's logically a simple operation and also not necessarily a slow one. (Though it may sometimes be slow in practice)

--
Rene´ Hartmann