Re: Database design, Keys and some other things

mAsterdam wrote:
> Marshall Spight wrote:
>
> The snipped questions weren't purely retorical.
> They pointed in another direction.
> Many interesting things happen at boundaries - but they
> are interesting only to people who are interested.

Here are the snipped questions:

> What does exist oustide the minds of the users? This
> relationship is a shared illusion. How did it come into being?

There is a category of questions for which their defining characteristic is that we can make no observations to test hypotheses about them. Is there a God? What happens when you die? Is there an objective truth outside of my subjective perception?

These questions are big, big questions, no doubt. However, what makes a question interesting to me is, to what extent can cogitation, observation, discussion, and experimentation lead to a better understanding. So these big, big questions are not in any way interesting. They are the philosophical equivalent of an infinite loop: fun to look at for a short time, but they quickly become boring, because no progress can be made on the problem.

My favorite quote in this area comes from Jack Vance novel. Maybe it was "The Dying Earth." A mixed group of pilgrims and travellers were sitting around a campfire, and each in turn gave a description of his cosmology. At last they turned to Lodermulch, and said, say fellow, you have been quiet all through this. What is your idea of the universe? And Lodermulch said, "Observe this rent in my garment. I am at a loss to explain its presence. I am even more puzzled by the existence of the universe."

Followups to comp.databases.metaphysics

> > Okay. It strikes me, though, that this leads directly
> > to a refutation of the idea that there's any essential
> > difference between the industry standard external
> > identifier and the database-specific surrogate key:
> > it's a matter of context merely, and not anything
> > intrinsic to that data, or how it is managed.
>
> Emphasizing your /only/ in "only in the minds of the users"
> and /merely/ in "a matter of context /merely/", I'ld say
> the minds of users and context are as essential as it gets.
>
> What would be essential in your view?

The question is: essential to what?

We were discussing whether there was a difference between the natures of external ids vs. surrogate keys. What is essential to this question is what their nature is. Generally we do not regard context-specific considerations as essential.

Marshall Received on Sat Oct 01 2005 - 18:52:49 CEST