Re: Entity and Identity

From: Clifford Heath <no.spam_at_please.net>
Date: Wed, 30 Sep 2009 16:22:02 +1000
Message-ID: <hOCwm.251125$vp.224824_at_newsfe12.iad>

Bob Badour wrote:

> Clifford Heath wrote:

>> Bob Badour wrote:

>>> Why won't relation valued attributes achieve what you want? Why 
>>> invent some new name?

>> They would - for those that know what they are. I'm addressing more
>> than just the DB research community here though.
> Inventing new words to mean exactly the same as some existing term does > nothing to help anyone. Do you go around renaming addition and division?

It's not exactly the same thing. It's a thing that contains, is built on, a deeply nested relation, but it doesn't just refer to the static content, but to the object-based representation and programming API, and the way those objects work in the face of perhaps not all the attributes of each object having been included in the query. It's a little hard to explain, and though I've demonstrated it, I haven't yet published a screencast.

Suffice to say, I find it works rather well for conveniently combining objects with relations, even though those objects aren't quite traditional. I think it could help the industry write better applications by making better use of the RM, without abandoning the convenience of objects.

Why are you so antagonistic to that goal?

>> Would you care to comment on the substance of my posts, instead of the
>> terminology?
> So far, terminology is the substance of your posts.

That's false, and you know it. I've made a number of factual claims, together with pointers to the information that backs them up, but you haven't bothered yourself to even look at them. Otherwise you'd be asking different questions than simply "Why?".

But before I pursue that... in regard to terminology... fact orientation is built on FOL, not on set theory. By itself, that isomorphism means there is going to be parallel terminology. Would you ask mathematicians to only use set theory, or only use FOL, without ever having recourse to the other? Is either truly superfluous?

People understand facts much more readily than they understand relations. Facts verbalise better, and emerge from the analysis of verbalisations. If a change in terminology can help establish correct use of RM, what's not to like about that?

>> On the one hand, you seem to be familiar with and respect Nijssen and
>> Halpin's work and on the other, profoundly ignorant. Which is it?
> Let me know when you figure it out.

Ok, help me. You challenged me over not having made factual claims. One factual claim I made is that CQL handles join constraints more fully than any previous technology. This capability is also key to its use as a query language. Before I spend time substantiating that claim, how's about you tell me which ORM graphical constraint types already include (or can include) implicit joins? If you can, I'll continue my defense. If you don't, I'll assume you're just ignorant.

But I expect you'll just splutter some emotive irrelevant crap instead, or duck the question to avoid having to actually doing some research.

-- 
Clifford Heath, Data Constellation, http://dataconstellation.com
Agile Information Management and Design

Received on Wed Sep 30 2009 - 08:22:02 CEST