Re: storing survey answers of different data types

On Fri, 24 Apr 2009 11:59:30 +1000, Gene Wirchenko <genew_at_ocis.net> wrote:

> "Joe Thurbon" <usenet_at_thurbon.com> wrote:
>
> [snip]
>
>> My name is Joe, I have property in Australia, my house if 40 years old.
>
> Hi, my name is Gene. I do not have any real estate, but I live
> in an apartment in Canada. My apartment is about fifteen 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?
>
> Sure. See my other post. It is easy to list a questionnaire.
> One need not even look at the questionnaire responses tables.
>

(I've reproduced the relevant bits from your other post here)

> Question Table
> -
> Questionnaire Number
> Question Number
> Question Type
> Question Text
>Responses to Questionnaire 58 Table
> -
> -- Lame Column Name -- Friendly Column Name ----
> Question 1 Response text Name
> Question 2 Response int Age at Time of Questionnaire
> Question 3 Response text Opinion of Prime Minister Question 4
> Response text Opinion of Opposition Leader

It seems that your suggested solution could not have a constraint that "every Questionnaire Number in 'Question Table' refers to a Questionaire table". Is that right?

>> 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.)
>
> Relations always have facts asserted about them. Their structure
> is a fact asserted about it.
>

Yep, sure. That is true. But I was under the impressions that being able to represent a relation's structure as a relation was a pleasant symmetry, but not a necessity (ugh, that word again)

I guess what I am uncomfortable about is that these statements containing relation-names are in some sense 2nd order, and so are hard to write queries and constraints against.

Cheers,
Joe Received on Fri Apr 24 2009 - 04:29:53 CEST