Re: VAT rate or VAT amount as a column?

Emily Jones wrote:

> A view isn't the same as a base table though is it? Materialised or not.

No, a view, by definition, is not a base table. The base tables provide the raw (logical) material from which we construct application views. While each application might view the database as a normalized set of relations, the union of the application views and the base tables generally won't be normalized and will have considerable redundancy.

While views are derived from the base tables, though, the base tables are themselves derived from physical storage. Thus it is conceivable that an attribute in a base table will be derived from other stored attributes rather than physically stored itself. That's generally not possible with available SQL dbmses at this time. Received on Sun Aug 06 2006 - 08:12:38 CDT