Re: Does Codd's view of a relational database differ from that ofDate&Darwin?[M.Gittens]

Alexandr Savinov wrote:
<SNIP>
> In order to understand why do we need tables and what
> is their role consider the following example. Instead of one wide table
> for all types of objects we are tought to introduce several more special
> tables with only a smaller subset of columns. Such tables will have less
> rows. However, then we might want to inroduce even more specialized
> tables and so on. Finally we get a large number of tables each with a
> relatively small number of rows. Interestingly, we can continue this
> process and get tables with no rows at all! Thus theoretically we can
> express our semantics without rows by using only tables. One simple
> conclusion is that "data semantics can be expressed by tables rather
> than only by rows (in tables)". It is very strong and somewhat
> surprising result.

You are not kidding!

> In such an approach we do not need rows because
> anything can be modelled by means of tables. Such a model is ugly from
> relational point of view (although we simply followed an advice to
> decompose tables) however it is interesting from theoretical point of
> view (with big consequences).

Which part of the decomposition process reduces 1 row to 0 rows? I must have missed that part... Received on Tue Jun 07 2005 - 12:55:46 CEST