Re: Representation for Heterogeneous Attribute Set
Date: Fri, 11 Feb 2005 09:12:03 -0600
Message-ID: <cuii0i$vrq$1_at_news.netins.net>
<robertbrown1971_at_yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:1108102001.898621.256240_at_l41g2000cwc.googlegroups.com...
<snip>
> THE QUESTIONS:
>
> Are the four approaches I described above exhaustive? Are there any
> other that I overlooked?
>
I hesitate to mention this, but in case you are open to using data models
other than relational, this is a perfect application for tools that permit
weak typing, among other features. If you were to model this application in
XML documents, for example, ignoring dtds and xsds for now, you will see
that the pattern to the data that makes sense in your mind and the minds of
the users can also make sense to a database product. It simply isn't a good
match for today's RDBMS implementations, nor for a strongly typed
persistence engine.
--dawn Received on Fri Feb 11 2005 - 16:12:03 CET