Re: Database design

Mark Johnson wrote:
> .... For all intents, a component or concept
> can itself become a leaf or black box. An atom or unit. An item.

Yes. It depends on your point of view. In which facts are you interested? Your answer to this question determines which facts you are going to preserve. Now in database design, you have to decedide beforehand which type of facts you are interested in. So, at that time you decide what you consider atomic, or something containing other things, or both.

> And
> any item can be a component, and has some limited meaning and utility
> by itself, by its very definition. The tone middle-C is still
> middle-C. In the same example, I can see, however, that one might wish
> to distinguish such elementary building blocks as a controller scalar
> from a full run of such. Still, I don't know. I suppose as a practical
> matter, one would only reference a component but have to refer to
> items in a different fashion.

It depends on which things in the world you label 'Entity' (definition: thing of interest). Received on Wed Feb 22 2006 - 20:54:00 CET