Re: The MySQL/PHP pair

"Kenneth Downs" <firstinit.lastname_at_lastnameplusfam.net> wrote in message news:6qlemc.4ci.ln_at_192.168.10.210...
> Laconic2 wrote:
>
> >
> > I honestly never had a great deal of difficulty putting data in 1NF. On
> > the contrary, I've had a great deal of difficulty dealing with
> > fundamentally
> > unnormalized data that has been put into tabular form, and masquerades
as
> > 1NF data. example: crosstabulated data that uses values as column
> > headers.
> >
>
> Quick segue: do you mean this is a problem when stored permanently, or
when
> it appears as something prepared for human consumption? or both?

This is actually a very important question. There are times and places when crosstabulation is of the essence when data is being prepared for human consumption. Witness the use of pivot tables in Excel, or conversion into multidimensional form for OLAP. I'm not objecting to crosstabulating data in that environment, at all.

I'm referring to data stored in an RDBMS in crosstabulated form, and then being retrieved with SQL, and being processed with some kind of procedural language. What a pain that is. Received on Thu Nov 04 2004 - 22:52:17 CST