Re: By The Dawn's Normal Light

"Marshall Spight" <mspight_at_dnai.com> wrote in message news:qPued.174986$He1.52710_at_attbi_s01...
> "Laconic2" <laconic2_at_comcast.net> wrote in message
news:iMOdncX2X68wmOTcRVn-2g_at_comcast.com...
> >
> > As I said to Marshall, I'm prepared to retreat to a standard definition
if
> > there is one.
>
> There is no broad agreement for a definition of 1NF. My suspicion
> is that this is a symptom of their being no useful concept therein.
>
> There is also no broad agreement for a definition of "atomic value."
> Here I suspect even more strongly that the concept is empty.
> Performing multiple *operations* atomically has a very clear meaning,
> though.

On these two points I am in complete agreement. It sounds like Laconic2 is there too (at least on 1NF). Date & Darwin also seem to be somewhat in agreement on 1NF (in their own way) and on the notion of "atomic" not being a useful concept. However, at least Date then defines (or re-defines) a relation with some rigidity and claims that the only structure other than a scalar value (which differs from an atomic value in some way I cannot recall) for an attribute is his def of a relation. These claims are not backed up with any mathematics, logic, nor even experiment, as best I can tell. The argument is that if we have a relational engine for our relations, then we can use that for nested relations as well. Sure, but if we can help the developer with more structures, then why not do that. Let's have the computer do more work so the analyst doesn't have to.

On to lists -- how much agreement is there on this list that having "the computer" handle insertion, addition, and removal from ordered lists rather than having developers do their own ordering algorithms, makes sense. That is, does it make sense for the databases to handle ordered lists as one of the possible collections it will store? --dawn

> Marshall
>
>
Received on Sat Oct 23 2004 - 18:07:05 CEST