Re: Can we solve this -- NFNF and non-1NF at Loggerheads

"BECAUSE of Date & Darwin's (relatively) new definition of 1NF. Can you not see from Date's new definitions that now a relation can be in 1NF even if there is a list, queue, stack, set, relation, linked list, hash table, or ... as the value of an attribute in that relation? Date adds somewhere
(maybe that is in the "legal value" def?) that the only such data structures he would accept would be relations, but even if his definition of 1NF only permits that construct, it changes the meaning of 1NF significantly, right? How many practitioners today would say that they are putting a relation in
1NF and then proceed to leave nested relations in the model? That muddies the water a lot from my perspective, with the work I am doing. Make sense? --dawn "

I think this new 1NF also totally invalidates a general principle of orthoganality of type to the relational model. Has Date explicitly stated that this principle no longer holds true somewhere?

Thanks,

Dan Received on Mon Feb 07 2005 - 20:11:59 CET