Re: By The Dawn's Normal Light

Dawn M. Wolthuis wrote:
>>I don't see the problem really, don't we all understand and agree what
>>internal structure means? I think the key point of the definition is
>>that atomicity is always with respect to a system rather than an
>>absolute concept.

> 
> As soon as you have an extensible system, what does it matter whether there
> is a function to split out a date into parts today if we could write one to
> grab the month out tomorrow?  --dawn

Well, the system that is the relational engine isn't extensible. The extensible part is the type engine (assuming the DBMS allows people to define their own domains). I guess you're right that the atomicity of a value w.r.t. the type engine could be changed, but I don't think this isn't really where atomicity of values is such a useful concept.

The main purpose of introducing the idea of atomic values is when seen through the relational engine in particular.

Paul. Received on Sun Oct 24 2004 - 22:03:31 CEST