Re: Database design

Alexandr Savinov wrote:
> JOG schrieb:
> > Mark Johnson wrote:
> >> "x" <x_at_not-exists.org> wrote:
> >>
> >>> "Roy Hann" <specially_at_processed.almost.meat> wrote in message
> >>> news:3--dnYnbkrrCfmTenZ2dnUVZ8qadnZ2d_at_pipex.net...
> >>>> "x" <x_at_not-exists.org> wrote in message news:dtcjfn$f87$1_at_nntp.aioe.org...
> >>> Well, the slippery part is not that amusing after a while.
> >>>> I am more inclined to read it as just the usual witless gaff of noticing
> >>>> that the bounding box of a printed representation of a table has length
> >>>> width and leaping to the conclusion that a table is therefore
> >>>> two-dimensional; planar: flat.
> >> Then I certainly stand to be corrected. I thought the relation was
> >> thought to be essentially an unordered set or list of entities, and
> >> nothing more.
> >
> > A tuple does not equate to an entity, in fact far from it.

>

Please Google entity-relationship for how the term is commonly used in this sort of field. Surely its obvious there is no one to one correspondence between a tuple and an entity due to 1NF normalization, if for no other reason.

This whole 'flat' debate is nonsense too. Write a database down in its mathematical form, devoid of tables, and tell me how on earth it can be flat (which semantically means two-dimensional of course), deep, fat, thin, whatever. If you mean it doesn't support composite types say that. If you mean it contains no explicit links, say that. Calling it flat is semantically redundant and doesn't aid any real discussion. Received on Wed Feb 22 2006 - 03:00:22 CET