Re: date as a foreign key

> In article <8eIr7.64$h4.2891_at_petpeeve.ziplink.net>, David Cressey says...

(the outcome was that an integer-type of time  should be fine, as long as you make sure you obtain its value once, and  use that ever after)

>> Real Numbers (floating point numbers) are a poor choice for indexes, and
>> therefore a poor choice for primary keys.
>> Although Oracle timestamps are not real numbers, they suffer from the same
>> problem somewhat. The problem is that we tend to treat "equality" of two
>> measurements as being a somewhat fuzzy concept. If the difference between
>> two measurements is less than some suitably small value, epsilon, we say
>> "close enough" and regard them as equal.

> Therefore, you insist upon a discrete domain for foreign key constraints only?

Sounds reasonable. Although I suspect that some applications (image analysis, time-dependent stuff, things involving physical measurements) migth have the need for continuous keys. I don't think you can call them foreign keys anymore, since by definition 'equals' a primary key, which by definition is unique, which can't be guaranteed if 'equals' is an interval operation.

I think constraint databases do these kinds of things. Anyone care to comment?

> Then, strings would probably be a poor choice as well, because the difference
> between the 2 could be "infinetely" small. Take "David Cressey" and "Dave
> Cressey", for example, isn't it pretty much much the same as 1.00000 and
> 1.00001? 

No, not at all. Strings are countable, reals are not. I.e., you set up a scheme to enumerate all the infinitely many strings; you cannot do that for reals, because you can always add an additional one between the n-th and (n+1)th. It clearly works for natural numbers and also for rationals. It would work for reals that are represented in fixed-length bit-patterns (actually do databases internally use IEEE 754 for that, or what?), but not in general.

                                                                      Philip

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