What a table is.
Date: Sat, 16 Jul 2005 16:48:45 GMT
Message-ID: <NTaCe.12121$aY6.10655_at_newsread1.news.atl.earthlink.net>
Accepting mA's comment that the glossary is not FOLDOC, I went off to FOLDOC, and then to Wikipedia, to see what's there.
This is from Wikipedia's entry on the Relational model.
"A table is an accepted visual representation of a relation; a tuple is
similar to the concept of row."
I like this, except that the word "visual" implies that the observer uses
"vision". I prefer this:
"A table is an accepted visible representation of a relation; a tuple is
similar to the concept of row."
Visible merely means that it's part of the interface. In this case it's the SQL interface.
With regard to "Base Normal Form", tables that are not in base normal form represent bags of tuples. Tables that are in Base Normal Form represent relations. Optional columns in tables (ones that might contain NULLS) represent outer joins. Received on Sat Jul 16 2005 - 18:48:45 CEST