Re: The MySQL/PHP pair

"Dawn M. Wolthuis" <dwolt_at_tincat-group.comREMOVE> wrote in message news:cmem4f$g32$1_at_news.netins.net...

> I actually didn't say that he never made such a claim (although I didn't
> know if he had) but that he originally was well aware that normalization
was
> based on pragmatics and not on some mathematical principle.

I guess I've been misunderstanding your position.

Are you saying that normalization, as such, is not mathematical?

There are certainly other places in math where the term "normal form" is used.

> My claim is that there is nothing about modeling data logically as
relations
> that requires 1NF (as previously defined).

Agreed. But that's not the same thing as saying that it's not a good modeling principle.

It's that point where your point of view and mine differ.

> I have no hidden agenda unless it is also hiding from me. I have an
> interest in advancing the discipline of software development and ongoing
> maintenance.

My interest, on the other hand, is advancing the discipline of data management.

> One of the obstables might be RDBMS's as currently
> implemented.

I'd suggest that most of your points would apply equally to any DBMS. You yourself have said that Pick is NOT a DBMS.

How about the current IBM products you keep mentioning. Are they DBMSes?

> My experience and intuition RATHER THAN ANY proven theory or
> emperical data suggests that we need to do something decidedly different
> with data storage for at least a good number of software implementations.
> Maybe one of these days it will all be clear how to either prove something
> mathematically or gather the right emperical data to bring this together,
> but until then, I'm still on a search.

I would suggest that you widen the search to include those people who DID get good "bang for the buck" out of the RDBMS implementations that you think are part of the problem. Received on Fri Nov 05 2004 - 05:45:18 CET