Re: Database design, Keys and some other things

JOG wrote:
> > " The claim was made that the real world didn't contain
> > predicates that included artificial keys. So I guess that
> > means VIN, bank account number, and SSN are supernatural! Spooky!"
>
> Marshall,
>
> You have rather misunderstood. Noone has made any such claim the real
> world doesn't contain artificial identifiers such as VIN's and SSN's.

You said "The real world is stating a predicate such as [...] NOT 'There is a car [...] with an invisible universal id of 24." I took your "invisible universal id" to be a reference to artificial identifiers. If you're saying artificial identifiers are okay but invisible universal ids are not, I'm not clear what the distinction is.

> The claim was that if you are modelling the real world you should not
> have to add new imaginary keys, you're encoded predicate pretending as
> though they were properties of the real world statement, just for the
> database to work. It's a hack.

When you say it's a hack, do you mean that there are problems with the appoach, and that there are better ways to do it that don't have those problems? Can you state what the problems are, and what the better approach is?

Marshall Received on Tue Sep 27 2005 - 18:57:59 CEST