Re: Many To Many Relationships

David Cressey wrote:
> Marshall wrote in message

>> David Cressey wrote:
>>>> Something like that. Requires RVAs and an aggregate union.
>>>> Clearly no standard way to do in SQL, but there might be
>>>> some hack that lets you do the union as a string operation
>>>> which might be sufficient for some applications.

>>> OK, but what I offered was not a hack.  For once, I was trying to give a
>>> serious response to this kind of question.
>>>
>>> (You may not recognize it as such,  but it's the same question that Dawn
>>> has raised a dozen times in the last few years.)
>>>
>>> Pushing the result of a SQL query through a hierarchical report writer
>>> is really not hacking.  It's serious work, albeit without much theoretical
>>> merit at all.
>> Oh, totally. I didn't intend to detract from your answer at all.
>> Your answer was practical; mine was almost entirely impractical.
>>

There are some choices to be made. Political choices, no less ('political' defined here as affecting other peoples interest).

> turning hierarchical data into relational data is, in some
> cases, non trivial. This suggests that storing database data in relational
> form is better than storing it in hierarchical form, provided there is some
> utility in doing so.

Ah. If that was all of the point you wanted to make: sure, of course :-)

> Most theoreticians already know this, and know it better than I have
> verbalized it. But it's worth making it explicit.
Received on Thu Apr 19 2007 - 00:43:28 CEST