Path: news.easynews.com!core-easynews!newsfeed3.easynews.com!easynews.com!easynews!news.glorb.com!logbridge.uoregon.edu!newsfeed.stanford.edu!newsfeed.news.ucla.edu!ucdavis!ihnp4.ucsd.edu!news.service.uci.edu!not-for-mail From: Larry Coon Newsgroups: comp.databases.theory Subject: Re: A Normalization Question Date: Wed, 07 Jul 2004 14:23:55 -0700 Organization: University of California Lines: 21 Message-ID: <40EC69EB.723F@assist.org> References: <20040626120209.29625.00000578@mb-m16.aol.com> <4b45d3ad.0406300959.36b2b9d2@posting.google.com> <2kggoeF24agdU1@uni-berlin.de> <4b45d3ad.0407011053.37b54dec@posting.google.com> <4b45d3ad.0407060953.4e111054@posting.google.com> <40EB1C2F.7B5A@assist.org> <4b45d3ad.0407061932.34d640cb@posting.google.com> Reply-To: lcnospam@assist.org NNTP-Posting-Host: larry.assist.uci.edu Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: Mozilla 3.01Gold (WinNT; I) Xref: core-easynews comp.databases.theory:36674 X-Received-Date: Wed, 07 Jul 2004 14:29:14 MST (news.easynews.com) Tony wrote: > You are of course confusing logical and physical issues - and your > issue is absurd in any case. It is not LOGICALLY redundant to record > that "Car X is brown" and "Dog Y is brown", because these are two > different facts. You are presumably saying that it is PHYSICALLY > redundant to store the 5 characters of "brown" twice on the disk, and > so you want to physically store the word "brown" once and then point > to it many times. You couldn't do that -- if more than one thing POINTS to "brown," then the pointers are stored redundantly. Infinite regress rears its ugly head. So in Neo's world, any attribute (eg: "brown") can only appear once in the entire database. Got a brown car and a brown dog? Tough -- Neo's dbms can't handle that. Larry Coon University of California