Re: some information about anchor modeling

On 05/11/2012 1:27 PM, compdb_at_hotmail.com wrote:
> On Sunday, November 4, 2012 10:31:33 AM UTC-8, vldm10 wrote:
>> Speaking in the style of maritime terms,

it seems to me that the "anchor relation" as a kind of a release ink.
>
> I cannot make sense of "as [has? is?] a release ink [link?]"

but I am interested to know what you meant.

("Speaking in the style of maritime terms,"

an anchor has a chain that has links but "has/is a release link"

still makes no sense.)
>
> philip

I'm more interested to hear why people think keys matter and how they matter, not about anchors. Ordinary English is full of nautical idioms, that's just the result of its rapid development during the host country's 19th century adventures, durimg a time when I gather that the other "Western" languages such as French didn't change much. (I don't know if it's merely a coincidence that most of the people who strike me as the deepest RT thinkers happen to be English.)

I wish people would ask about the importance of keys in the first place, instead of this "anchor" variant. I wish they would keep aspects of English out of it. Codd was surely a pragmatist who I think chose his adjectives to help encourage his ideas among commercial users, not to embellish any credentials of rigour (although I image he could have if he had wanted to - nobody can ever know that now). Not to disparage rigour in general, but where practical advantages are concerned, one eventually has to make choices. Forums like this one have been obsessed for years with topics that had to do with choices that are quite subjective, in other words quite concerned with the ease of automating a particular application.

For myself, the chief advantage of what Codd called a key is to enable the identification of a proposition without going to the touble of specifying all of the proposition. (There are many other ways to express that sentence which I don't argue with.)

I wish this forum would get back to basic theoretical questions instead of talking about language nuance ( I realize avoiding them is hard, especially for people whose first language isn't English, nothing I can do about that.) Received on Tue Nov 06 2012 - 04:30:12 CET