Re: SQL For Smarties 3rd Edition - ATTN Joe Celko

Pickie wrote:
> Jan Hidders wrote:
> > David Cressey wrote:
> > >
> > > Here's the link to the top level page....
> > >
> > > http://www.utexas.edu/its/windows/database/datamodeling/rm/overview.html
> > >
> > > This leads down to E-R modeling, and introduces tables, etc. and also
> > > normalization.
> >
> > Indeed a very nice reference. But ... I'm not very happy with their
> > definitions of the normal forms.
> <rest snipped>
>
> I'm surprised there wasn't a howl of outrage at this!
>
> "The relational model represents data in the form of two-dimension
> tables. Each table represents some real-world person, place, thing, or
> event about which information is collected. A relational database is a
> collection of two-dimensional tables."

I think the author must be confused and thinking of "columns" as one dimension and "rows" as the other. I used to make that mistake myself too. It's easily done. The mistake I, and perhaps the author, made was that we saw a "row" representing what I might call a record, but failed to immediately see that it also represents an n-dimensional tuple. Guffaw! Received on Thu Nov 16 2006 - 04:38:36 CET