Path: newssvr20.news.prodigy.com!newsmst01.news.prodigy.com!prodigy.com!news.glorb.com!newsgate.cistron.nl!transit.news.xs4all.nl!not-for-mail Date: Thu, 11 Mar 2004 01:28:45 +0100 From: mAsterdam User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040113 X-Accept-Language: nl, de, fr, en, en-us, ja, ko, zh MIME-Version: 1.0 Newsgroups: comp.databases.theory Subject: Re: Is this bad design ? References: <404c9b34$0$281$4d4ebb8e@read.news.nl.uu.net> <404f2635$0$575$e4fe514c@news.xs4all.nl> <404f9ee3$0$558$e4fe514c@news.xs4all.nl> In-Reply-To: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Lines: 14 Message-ID: <404fb2cc$0$558$e4fe514c@news.xs4all.nl> NNTP-Posting-Date: 11 Mar 2004 01:29:01 CET NNTP-Posting-Host: 194.109.233.75 X-Trace: 1078964941 news.xs4all.nl 558 [::ffff:194.109.233.75]:4085 X-Complaints-To: abuse@xs4all.nl Xref: newssvr20.news.prodigy.com comp.databases.theory:24659 Dawn M. Wolthuis wrote: > ...I think a lot of relational design relates to YAGNI while some of the more > obvious desired changes end up getting hard-coded into the database -- for > example, cardinality of attributes. A second thought: Any tendency to *over*emphasize structure at the cost of substance leads to unnecessary detail. The screws and the hammer come to mind when remembering many sessions with people excersizing functional decomposition (that is really old, e.g. HIPO) and lossless decomposition (relational modelling).