Re: Database design

"Marshall Spight" <marshall.spight_at_gmail.com> wrote:

>Am I correct?

Let's review.

You wrote: "I'm concerned about how rising gas prices are going to affect database theorists and their ability to drive to work. Discuss."

It was an effort to control a thread to the extent of literally telling people what they could say, and how they could say it. Someone else objected to your saying this.

And so I reminded you:

"They pool or take public transit, in any case. But it might cause
some to fret exceedingly, to the point that their papers might not go into sufficient detail, or provide sufficiently detailed examples, of their work and proposals. It's really an old complaint with academic publications, to be fair."

I was trying to be funny like you were trying to be funny. I don't know that they pool or all use public transportation. But that was the initial complaint, that academic papers and books are often criticized for using trivially meaningless examples, for whatever reasons. It's an old complaint. It might be to disguise a known failure with the proposal or scheme. It might be that the scheme is known to scale well but it was seen as dangerous to drive the point home. Or whatever else.

Consider a sample complaint:

"The focus is on one, relatively simple application — “project
reporting by state and fiscal” — for which the hierarchic representation happens to be convenient; no consideration is given to other applications, which it likely complicates. "

But in your defense you quickly found yourself defending the indefensible:

You wrote: Of course. When you're writing a book about a technique, you show what it's good for, not what it's bad for.

I had to wonder: Sounds more like promotion or salesmanship.

Which went right past you: What's wrong with that?

And so I replied: I said what was wrong with that in the very next sentence.

You only hear about what was wrong with last year's model when it comes time to sell next year's model.

In other words, it seems irresponsible.

You carried on with: it by reading your mind. You promote something by showing what it's good for; any other choice is ineffective.

And I reminded you: But it might be more responsible, and your civic duty.

That is, to do otherwise. Particularly if you know of flaws in the scheme, you need to let other researchers know, not omit any reference or attempt to conceal it.

After all, I had reminded you, and then further stated:

"The subject, here, is technical papers and presentations. And in
addition, do the trivial academic examples conceal a fundamental problem with the approach? Does it work only narrowly and in the most simply contrived situation, even regardless of scale?"

That's one subthread. Do you agree or disagree as to pretty much how that went and what you said, and what I said?

Let's be clear about this.

Now as for this idea of a set not being ordered, or more importantly of a table corresponding to a set which is not to be ordered, you had said:

"A relation is a kind of set."

Obviously, I replied, "It is a set." My question has to do with both a set ordering, and whether the table corresponds to a set, as I've said many times, now.

And in attempting to defend such orthodoxy against order, you again stepped off the beam, in my opinion, and entered into this defense:

You said, "ever said a sentence was a set of words!

To which I obviously had to say, "A sentence may be stored as a table of words and phrases, in their proper order."

I wondered that, "Your objection almost seems to be to the idea of - proper order. Almost."

Maybe more than almost. I'm not sure.

And you carried it to an absurd extreme, to which I offered a simple and quite obvious counter-example:

I wrote, "Let's try this. You wrote this, just above. But allow me to take it out of order:

Which you had written: For any list, we can construct a pair of relations that contains the same information. We do not need the use of an ordered collection to do so.

I continued, "Becomes:

'Any construct that contains relations we can pair with a list for the same information. To do we so ordered an not need use of the collection.'

At the very least, it is not what you said, but something different, and verging on incoherent and useless. It's not in its proper order. It's not the original data. That was never stored, it seems."

In short, what I said:

"Someone touched on this, before.

They said that (a,b), was an ordered pair. But what if we say that (a,b) is also a set. What if we show that we could define (a,b) in terms of the elements and an unordered pair in a set. But if we have an order, (a,b), why not add c at the end, and d, up to say a total of nine and then substitute in the names on the roster? It preserves the proper ordering, however you might otherwise expand the notation. There it is. It suggests, almost, an ordered tuple. If the 'new math' creates a sense that order is not maintained in ordered data, let that superstition depart. In fact, wasn't it said at one point that the attributes in a tuple are ordered the same way in each relation? almost if one were still speaking of punch cards? In other words, one might simply say, but that's a different 'kind' of order, a punch card field order, which never represents any ranking of the data. That is, and in this very example, the tuple isn't the entire batting order at any point in the game. It's not a relation of batting orders. It's one batter. It's ordered, perhaps, but not the order from the data, until one begins to name attributes, insisting upon a name/value pair, a 'keyword search'. In practical terms of a database implementation, I believe column/positional reference is still typically used. But then one will say, that 9-tuple can never describe a relation of nine members/elements. That, at least, is not in its proper order, all is saved. But if the tuple is one attribute, and this unique type of ordering/sorting attribute, then at what point does one say that you have an ordered relation?" Received on Fri Feb 24 2006 - 08:01:55 CET