Re: Multiple tables refer to one -To use foreign keys or not?

Adriano Varoli Piazza wrote:

> On 29 mayo, 22:11, Bob Badour <bbad..._at_pei.sympatico.ca> wrote:
>

>>Gene Wirchenko wrote:
>>
>>>Adriano Varoli Piazza <mora..._at_gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>>>On 29 mayo, 18:38, Bob Badour <bbad..._at_pei.sympatico.ca> wrote:
>>
>>>>>I will cite Date's _Principle of Incoherence_ and ask whether you are
>>>>>re-inventing EAV, yet again?
>>
>>>>Readinghttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entity-Attribute-Value_model,
>>>>but this doesn't look like the same problem at first glance. I'll try
>>>>to wrap my head around the concept.
>>>>Though it does seem to be an awful lot of work for this particular
>>>>task.
>>
>>>>Thanks for the readup anyway, if it's the right solution, good, and if
>>>>it's not, I'll avoid reinventing stuff in the future.
>>
>>>     It is not the right solution.  It is a hideous way to do it.
>>
>>And I want to make clear I wasn't accusing the OP of anything hideous. I
>>could not make enough sense of his post to tell what he was doing, and
>>some of it seemed suggestive of yet another reinvention of EAV. Not
>>enough to say for sure, though.

No, actually, it wouldn't have. You might have preferred it, but it would have done you a lot more harm than good.

> Still, I'm not offended by people telling me I'm doing things the
> worst way, or telling me what I wrote is confusing.
> I half suspect it anyway. This is very new to me.
>
> As I said, EAV is an interesting concept, and one I'd rather know, so
> thanks for pointing it out, even if it's not related to this.
>
> Saludos
> Adriano

The only really useful and helpful thing I can say is: You need to learn the fundamentals before you start designing databases. And learning the fundamentals has nothing to do with learning the SQL language. Received on Fri May 30 2008 - 12:10:31 CDT