Re: Academic name for associative array when used to pair column names with data

On Wednesday, March 19, 2014 2:08:48 PM UTC+1, william.d..._at_gmail.com wrote:
> > It's just "tuple". Since neither relations (tables) nor tuples (rows) are ordered in their attributes
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> > (columns), it is convenient and typical to characterize relations as sets of tuples and tuples as
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> > sets of name-value pairs.
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> Hi Philip,
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> Thanks for your reply.
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> So, there's no proper way to distinguish by nomenclature a tuple of just the data values from a tuple of the pairing of the attribute names with the data values?
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> I'm picking on this because I'm trying to name something and would like to do better than "key-value" or "name-value" if I can.
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> Perl would let me re-use "tuple" for the "%name_needed" variable, but I think that would be confusing to anyone else who reads the code.
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> Thanks,
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> William

Is your question for a proper name for the '2x1' thingy in isolation ?

that would be just "value". (As distinct from "attribute value". "Value" refers to a member of a data type, "attribute value" refers to the possible appearance of the value in a tuple/relation as being "the" value for that attribute in a tuple [of a relation] ).

There's a rather solid treatment on precisely your issue of terminology in "Introduction to relational database theory" by Hugh Darwen.

Just keep in mind that these subtle distinctions will not be understood if you mention them to your average SQL database guy. Received on Thu Mar 20 2014 - 08:26:57 CET