Re: storing survey answers of different data types
From: Bob Badour <bbadour_at_pei.sympatico.ca>
Date: Thu, 23 Apr 2009 21:17:57 -0300
Message-ID: <49f10537$0$5473$9a566e8b_at_news.aliant.net>
>
> My name is Joe, I have property in Australia, my house if 40 years old.
>
> Just wondering, if one of the requirements for a system included
> something like 'Be able to list all questionnaires', would
> you still consider one-table-per-questionairre a reasonable design?
Date: Thu, 23 Apr 2009 21:17:57 -0300
Message-ID: <49f10537$0$5473$9a566e8b_at_news.aliant.net>
> On Fri, 24 Apr 2009 03:32:22 +1000, Bob Badour
> <bbadour_at_pei.sympatico.ca> wrote:
>
> [...]
>
>> My name is Bob, I have property in Canada, my house is 114 years old.
>> {name=Bob,place=Canada,age=114)
>>
>> Different questionnaires. Different tables. A column for each
>> question. A row for each respondent. All described neatly in the
>> system catalog.
>
> My name is Joe, I have property in Australia, my house if 40 years old.
>
> Just wondering, if one of the requirements for a system included
> something like 'Be able to list all questionnaires', would
> you still consider one-table-per-questionairre a reasonable design?
Absolutely. It's a simple query from the system catalog.
> I think that there is a more abstract question trying to get out
> of my head. Maybe it's: 'When relations become things that
> have facts asserted about them, should one stop treating them as
> relations, and normalise further?" (where normalise is almost certainly
> the wrong word, but I'm not sure what the right one is.)
You must not be phrasing that well. All interesting relations have facts asserted about them. Degree. Cardinality. Functional dependencies. etc. Received on Fri Apr 24 2009 - 02:17:57 CEST