Re: pro- foreign key propaganda?

David Cressey wrote:
...
> Absolutely. In the previous comments in this thread, the term "candidate
> key" was used.
> You can shorten that to simply, "key", if you like. No problem. The word
> "candidate" was introduced into the terminology with the idea that the
> primary key would be selected among the candidate keys. What I think I've
> learned in c.d.t. in years gone by is that the selection of one candidate
> key to be the primary key is not inherent in Relational modeling. IIRC, I
> learned it from Bob's writings.
> ...

Yes, isn't the choice what Date calls psychological, ie., part of the desired interpretation.

...
> I don't know "aref". That's a new one on me.
> ...

Oh, I should have said "a href".

> But don't get me started on HTML. I think that it was a wonderful thing for
> a physicist to come up with a way of propagating information over the
> internet without being blocked by format incompatibilities. But I also
> think that HTML was the ultimate perpetration of an uncontrolled graph of
> "hrefs" and pages. It has all the problems of a graph DBMS, and then some.

Okay, don't get me started on mysticism either! Received on Tue May 20 2008 - 17:31:41 CEST