Re: Generalised approach to storing address details

JOG wrote:
> Marshall wrote:
> > On Dec 13, 8:56 am, "Neo" <neo55..._at_hotmail.com> wrote:
> > > > It has been proven in numerous research studies that menu's
> > > > use is deletrious if nesting goes above two levels...
> > > > Imprisoning users in Hierarchy and the simulation of paper in a more
> > > > powerful media, are anchors round the neck of IT users that you would
> > > > do well to not perpetuate.
> > > > Very little in the world is hierarchical.
> > > When using Google to read the multitude of posts within a thread (like
> > > this one), do people find it imprisoning or liberating to use the
> > > tree/hierarchal interface along the left side? Could it be improved by
> > > limiting the depth to two levels or by presenting that information in a
> > > tabular form?
> >
> > I frickin' *hate* the tree view in Google Groups. I kill that pane
> > whenever I see
> > it and just use pure thread view. Thread view rulez; tree view suxorz.
> >
> > Hierarchy suxorz also, for most things.
> >
> >
> > Marshall
>
> Aye. It is very rare to see a usenet forum in tree view these days.
> People prefer a linear view, because after a couple of nests our wee
> heeds start to hurt. In fact, nevermind that, try teaching a first year
> undergrad java and see how much your ears bleed when you they produce
> code with upteen levels of nested if-statement sprawling off the
> screen, and can no longer spot any of their own bugs.
>
> Well, I guess there /are/ family trees - they're hierarchical right?
> And good luck explaining why to your wife or girlfriend!

Cute. In a discussion about women in church office this week, someone pointed out that it wasn't that many years ago when men talked about disciplining their wives. Of course, we once permitted people to own other people in the U.S. too. Yes, it is time to let go of such hierarchies.

Getting back to the topic of data and hierarchies... I might have mentioned this story before, but in the 80's there was a college and church donor database (where I worked) where every alumna who was unmarried had a record that was a logical child record of what they called a "dummy male record." If married, her record was a child record to her husband's record. So, as a female, you were only in this "database" (indexed sequential file system) as a subordinate to a male, whether a real one or a dummy. We've come a long way, baby.

Even though I work with what some call a hierarchical database, it is not considered a good practice to model strong entities in a hierarchical relationship with each other. At the higher level, the database represents a di-graph, but with trees on the nodes. Those trees represent a single entity, with weak entities and attributes subordinate to this entity. This approach to modeling data is seen throughout the industry, with enough success to consider it an industry "best practice" I suspect. It is hard to get relational database folks to identify the model with a name other than "hierarchical" however.

--dawn Received on Wed Dec 13 2006 - 21:28:47 CET