Re: Dawn doesn't like 1NF

On Wed, 6 Oct 2004 09:16:07 -0500, "Dawn M. Wolthuis" <dwolt_at_tincat-group.comREMOVE> wrote:

>this anyway. When I mention 1NF, I mean 1NF as it was defined until a few
>years ago and the 1NF that SQL-92 (and, therefore ODBC) understands, and the
>1NF that most RDBMS users put their data into.

1NF is the same thing as always, but it was traditionally misunderstood.

The traditional definition says that tuple attribute values must be atomic, but without saying what "atomic" means.

"Atomic" has not a precise definition and we could say that relation values are atomic.

> So, I am very pleased that
>the industry has gotten back to the concept that a value could legitimately
>be a list.

The most part of the industry still don't understand the concept.

>This is not well-known or well-taught as yet, although it is
>only with relational theory that the flawed notion of 1NF was brought into
>the database picture. Thankfully gains are being made, but it will take a
>long, long time before we fix our industry -- the 1NF craze (as previously
>defined) has been very costly.

Non scalar attribute types are seldom useful.

The most probable thing is that you never find a practical good use for them in your whole career.

>Wrong, bucko, I mean, Alfredo ;-)
>...
>One can specify graph paths in a variety of ways -- the specification can be
>metadata and not procedural code -- I am not referring to any implementation
>of the theory. I'm saying that the same theory humans use to navigate roads
>and the web can be used to navigate data. Navigation is NOT bad and does
>have a mathematical theory behind it as well.

After this, I am more sure of I am right than before.

Regards Received on Wed Oct 06 2004 - 17:23:55 CEST