Re: sql views for denomalizing

dawn wrote:
> Marshall Spight wrote:
> > then I'd count this
> > as a significant advantage to SQL. SQL's many-to-many handling
> > is ... just ... beautiful.
>
> Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Think of a web page with a list
> of students in a class. Click on a student and you see all of their
> classes with the attributes of each class. Click on the class you came
> from and you are back to that first list. There is no need for an
> intermediate web page to cross references these two. They can store
> all of their references without having helper tables to do so. From a
> logical modeling perspective, this is much more elegant, don't you
> think?

I'm not sure I follow this. We were talking about data structures and now you're talking about web pages. But it sounds like you're saying that a many-to-many table is not as good as having the two entities each contain a set of links to the other. If so, then you're comparing a data structure with no redundancy and that is therefor structurally immune to corruption, to one that has every datum twice, and that can get out of sync at the drop of a hat, and that needs every update to be done in two places.

I think the first one is the more elegant. But as you say, it's in the eye of the beholder.

Marshall Received on Thu Aug 04 2005 - 03:34:13 CEST