Re: relational reasoning -- why two tables and not one?
Date: Fri, 16 Oct 2009 01:55:47 GMT
Message-ID: <DoQBm.48229$Db2.41442_at_edtnps83>
Clifford Heath wrote:
> paul c wrote:
...
>> a very large number, intractable as they say, whereas I believe the >> very largest databases are likely to number their relations in the >> hundreds.
>
> I hope the SAP example shows that's simply not the case. 500 tables is
> considered to be medium-sized in my experience.
>
> Last year I used CQL to model motor vehicle insurance claims. The model
> had 100 nouns, though the database was only 18 tables. It did not include
> most of the complexity of motor vehicle insurance, did not model the
> policy,
> underwriting, insurance history, nor many other facets; and this
> organisation
> handled more than twenty other types of insurance.
>
A weak area in my generalizations is certainly the profusion of legal 'concepts', if such a dignified term is justified in the face of lawyers' devices to increase business, and the pathetic obeisance of business to cover itself by imagining it must 'model' those. Since the management of businesses started to fall to people who had no stake, most managers don`t understand the narrow purpose of the business they are supposedly running. The lawyers I've met didn't seem to have been taught the difference between nouns and verbs and they freely proliferate both. Their so-called industry is generally a pox on overall society too. Where I live, they have actually convinced most people that they need a lawyer to sell a house, eg., sign a deed and examine a certified cheque! I suppose other possessions will be next.
I knew an AVP in a financial company who had come up through the main business ranks and then been promoted to head a computer department. He was at his wit's end because the computer managers who reported to him used techicalese he didn't understand and he let them use that to get around his orders. I advised him to fire any underling who couldn't put the problem in his terms. He was too weak-minded to do that, but I still say business management should treat lawyers the same way.
The laws about retaining email amaze me. Even though I wasn't an admirer of the US President Nixon, probably if it had been up to me he never would have had to resign except because of personal testimony to the US Congress, certainly not because of his own tape recordings. He did plenty of damage, but I can`t see that his replacement improved anything. I don`t understand what principle all this retention of communication is involved, what good it does, blah, blah, blah. Received on Fri Oct 16 2009 - 03:55:47 CEST