Re: Principle of Orthogonal Design

Jan Hidders wrote:
> JOG wrote:

>> Jan Hidders wrote:
>>> Brian Selzer wrote:
>>>> This calls into question the idea that it should
>>>> be possible to determine which relation an inserted tuple is destined for.
>>> Apologies for being lazy, but could someone explain to me in a
>>> nutshell why this should be possible at all? At first sight this looks
>>> like complete nonsense to me.
>> Well, as far as I gather, being able to determine a unique predicate
>> for any proposition being inserted into the database is desirable in
>> order to allow view updates to be more easily be translated to changes
>> in underlying base relations.
>>
>> I cannot claim to fully understand the reasoning behind this, but view
>> updating hence appears to have been POOD's underlying motivation.
>> There is a relatively old draft paper by Date and McGoveran at living
>> athttp://www.dbdebunk.com/page/page/622331.htmwhich might be more
>> illuminating.

Unfortunately the link times out.

> What's interesting is that it seems to address the problem of
> normalization at the schema level, so not just restricted to one
> relation, as is usual in normalization theory. You might even
> formulate a new normal form at that level:
>
> A schema is said to be in HNF if all database dependencies follow
> logically from the dependencies at relation level (so domain, tuple
> and relation constraints) and the inclusion dependencies.
>
> So basically it says that inclusion dependencies are the only needed
> dependencies at database level. Note the similarity with 5NF (all join
> dependencies logically follow from the key dependencies) which says
> that the key constraints are the only needed constraints at relation
> level. That similarity is not a coincidence. In both cases we are
> eliminating redundancy. To get to a real normalization theory you
> would have to identify more concretely the type of database
> constraints / dependencies we are talking about.
>
> What POOD has to do with HNF is left to the reader as an exercise. ;-)

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