Re: boolean datatype ... wtf?

On Sep 30, 11:17 am, Tegiri Nenashi <tegirinena..._at_gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sep 30, 3:32 am, Tony Andrews <tony.andrew..._at_gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >  create table applications_with_immobolisers (application_id
> > references applications primary key);
> > ... etc.
>
> > That may be the right approach in a theoretical true RDBMS, but I'm
> > pretty sure it would get me sacked as a lunatic in any SQL-based DBMS
> > team!
>
> Ah, this is why one don't usually find any unary relation in SQL Dbms!
> This is very odd from theoretical perspective as one might expect
> there are many more unary relations than binary ones, many more binary
> than ternary and so on (akin to Zipfian distribution). Well SQL made
> creating a table more expensive than adding an column, that is one of
> its many implementational sins.

Isn't creating a new table conceptually more expensive than adding a column, regardless of the implementation? Perhaps this is why Date's well-known supplier and parts database has a S.STATUS column rather than a STATUS table, and P.COLOR column column rather than P.COLOR table, and all the attendent foreign keys. Received on Thu Sep 30 2010 - 20:23:38 CEST