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in reply to The crime under reusability

... I guess said programmer never really understood that the R stands for relational in RDBMS nor why X normal form is better than X-1 normal form.

This is the most asinine thing I've ever heard of. Thank you for sharing it. I now feel as if a hole in my being has been filled.

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Re: Re: The crime under reusability
by l3nz (Friar) on Dec 01, 2003 at 14:28 UTC
    I may be a little ironical here, but I believe the problem with RDBMS is that if you got a RDBMS everything looks like a table. There are many ways to store information around, but it seems the only "reasonable" way to do it is to hack together some sort of normalized form. This may be OK in some situations, but not in each and every one.

    Very often I believe a file, often a text one, might be more than enough: imagine if you had to store complex tree-like structures like a parsed programming language of your choice in a RDBMS!

    Then you are free to create second-level databases of your choice; but when you start to have tens of "link tables" just to trace trees or N:N relationships....

Re: Re: The crime under reusability
by hardburn (Abbot) on Dec 01, 2003 at 14:52 UTC

    From the point of view of pure theory, the designer was still under the relational system. It's just that the relational bit was being done at the application layer instead of the database.

    ----
    I wanted to explore how Perl's closures can be manipulated, and ended up creating an object system by accident.
    -- Schemer

    : () { :|:& };:

    Note: All code is untested, unless otherwise stated