Re: MV Keys

"Jon Heggland" <heggland_at_idi.ntnu.no> wrote in
> Yes, he says "repeating groups" and "nonsimple domains" are "roughly
> analogous", and uses a relational-valued attribute (RVA) as the (sole)
> example of an attribute with a non-simple domain. But he presents
> normalisation as something done for convenience.

This is a very, very important point. If you miss the point that normalization was proposed as a convenience, you are going to distort the entire history of the adoption of the RDM both by comercial DBMS vendors and by database theorists. Thanks Jon.

Also, if you boil Dawn's thesis down to it's bare essentials, it comes down to the assertion that normalization is an inconvenience.

If you can keep the debate on those terms, maybe it can be at least discussed rationally, if not settled.

For me, I live in an eighty-twenty world. Normalization, as I learned it in the eighties, is eighty percent convenience and twenty percent inconvenience. Received on Thu Mar 02 2006 - 15:25:04 CET