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

Philip,

I'm thinking about this more generally than relational databases in the vein of Codd. It seems like there is a similar concept of pairing column names with rows of data in other means of storing or transferring data.

For example, let's say that I had a csv and I created a similar a hash by pairing the header with a given row, or I had a JSON string like the following:

[

   {

"sound" : "loud",
"color" : "blue",
"season" : "fall"

   },
   {

"season" : "spring",
"sound" : "soft",
"color" : "red"

   },
   {

"season" : "winter",
"color" : "orange",
"sound" : "pin_drop"

   }
]

Is there a generic name for a hash when it contains the pairings of column names with the values from a given row regardless of what the underlying storage mechanism is?

I'll look into Darwen's "Introduction to relational database theory"

Thanks,

William Received on Thu Mar 20 2014 - 17:00:30 CET