Re: Temporal database - no end date

Bob Badour wrote:
> By your reasoning, one cannot calculate 'total fertility' unless one
> assumes children form a continuum. Absurd nonsense.

Replacement fertility (total is a sum, a computation for which there is no difficulty) is a statistic that has values like, say, 2.3 children. And no one, when dealing with fertility statistics, says that the "number of children" can ONLY be reasoned about with integers. As I showed with the quote, that is explicitly what DDL say about time quanta.

Is my quote incorrect? (And this is not a detail - DDL depend on this definition in much of their subsequent development of operations like PACK() and UNPACK().) Do DDL, anywhere in their book, diverge from this model? How do they treat statistics? Received on Sun Jan 21 2007 - 19:50:59 CET