Re: By The Dawn's Normal Light

On Fri, 22 Oct 2004 17:29:02 -0500, "Dawn M. Wolthuis" <dwolt_at_tincat-group.comREMOVE> wrote:

>I found a paper that I bought from Date last year specfically on 1st normal
>form. He starts with a quote from Codd
>
>"A relation is in first normal form if ...none of its domains has elements
>that are themselves sets. An unnormalized relation is one that is not in
>first normal form."

But why is he quoting Codd?

To correct him?

And what is the conclusion of Date's article?

>So, I think we can get passed the flawed statement that a relation is
>necessarily in first normal form.

This is astonishing even coming from you.

See this:

1NF: As we explain in PRACTICAL DATABASE FOUNDATIONS papers #1, What Normal Form Really Means, and #2, What First Normal Form Means Not, atomicity is not precisely definable and, therefore, neither would be a 1NF definition based on it. A table faithfully representing a relation variable (relvar) is by definition in 1NF and, therefore, has exactly one attribute value of the pertinent data type in each cell; any types of value are permissible, as long as they are associated with applicable operators.

http://www.inconcept.com/JCM/September2004/Pascal.html

I always thought that you were a troll, but this is too much. You are misquoting the article to show that it supports contrary of the article's conclusion.

> A normalized relation is in 1NF, but a
>relation, by its definition need not be. I'll read further to get what I
>think is Date's most recent def of 1NF.

So you didn't read the article ... Received on Sun Oct 24 2004 - 04:28:33 CEST