Re: Has E/R had a negative impact on db?

"JOG" <jog_at_cs.nott.ac.uk> wrote in message news:1145891568.891707.39790_at_t31g2000cwb.googlegroups.com...
> Jan Hidders wrote:
> > JOG wrote:
> > > Just a thought.
> >
> > Likewise. :-)
> >
> > > I don't like entities. In fact I despise entities, as the enemy of
good
> > > information philosophy. You see I just don't accept their existence.
> >
> > Actually, I don't see what you could possibly mean with that, and to
> > the extent that I can guess a meaning I find that a rather baffling
> > statement.
>
> Agreed, in a scientific paper, I would be embarressed by such nonsense,
> so take it with a pinch of salt - the prose is purple to engender
> responses, however one wishes to interpret such a rant. The point I am
> really making is that I see no satisfactory distinction between
> entities and relationships, that I find this jarring, and that perhaps
> making this split may not always be productive. Nonetheless, from this
> thread I have discovered ORM and have been pretty impressed by it.
>

OK, since you are seeking responses on the outer fringe, I'll give one. Look into the Hindu concept of Maya.
There's a short article in the wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_%28Hinduism%29

As near as I understand it, the idea is that the division of the universe of discourse into entities is at best subjective and, at worst, illusion. Is this anything along the lines of what you were pursuing?

Along the same lines, I too have had a philosophical problem with the distinction between "entities" and "relationships". What I'm toying with now is this: a binary relation ship is of order 2, a ternary is of order 3, etc. So what is a relationship of order 1? Well, gee whiz, it sure looks like an entity to me... If this sounds like hd waving, well it is. And I'm just toying with the idea right now. It isn't something I'd advance in a serious modeling discussion. Received on Tue Apr 25 2006 - 00:52:59 CEST