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No, the fact that he's not living in reality does. I never heard about Codd complaining about IBM's first relational implementation. In fact, have you read Cod
by ucee054 14y ago
No, the fact that he's not living in reality does.
I never heard about Codd complaining about IBM's first relational implementation. In fact, have you read Codd's papers defining relational databases and normal forms?
To even get to 1NF, you have to eliminate any non-atomic datatypes. How the hell are you going to do that?
Get rid of strings? Any idiot can put
"key1=value1;key2=value2" into a string and violate 1NF.
Any idiot can create two identically typed columns for storing the same attribute, instead of one, in the same table, and violate 1NF. Even frickin' dates are non-atomic.
There is no practical way for a database server to ENFORCE what Pascal calls "relational" on the users.
So actually the whole "SQL's not relational" bullshit boils down to three things: "WAAAH! DISTINCT should be the default!" "WAAAAH! we shouldn't have NULLs!" and "WAAAH! we shouldn't have recursive table definitions or hierarchy types!"
Back in the real world we want those features, because we NEED to represent hierarchies and "Not Applicable" values in our databases.
- TheZenPsycho 14y agoerr.... I think you are deeply confused. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_normal_form#Atomicity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_normal_form#Atomicity The rules of relational databases aren't the rules because some guy named CODD said they are. There are deeper principles of mathematics and logic at work. It's rather hysterical to claim that, because some guy named CODD explained the properties of this system in an ambiguous or confusing way, that the whole system should be disregarded as impractical nonsense.
- ucee054 14y agoWhat precisely am I confused about? You are linking to the 1NF wikipedia page section on atomicity. Are you alleging that I am confused about atomicity? Because I said strings and dates are not atomic. Here is your link: "A character string would seem not to be atomic, as the RDBMS typically provides operators to decompose it into substrings." By the way, dates can also be decomposed, into years, months, days, hours, minutes etc Oopsie, it appears that you're the one who's confused.
- TheZenPsycho 14y agoAnyone can click on that link and read it. You only make a fool of yourself by willfully failing to understand what is written there.
- ucee054 14y agoWell no, you make a fool out of yourself by reading something that isn't there. Instead of resorting to ad-hominems, you could have actually explained what I am supposed to be confused about, and what I am supposed to have "understood" from the page which was saying exactly the same as what I was saying. Or you could have tried to tackle the fact that we need NULLs and other "sins against Pascal", which was the point of my argument. You failed to do both. I conclude that you got nuthin'
- TheZenPsycho 14y agoSo you are saying that you insist that the correct definition of "atomic" is the one that is completely useless (by defining strings and dates as non atomic), and by extension makes the whole of the relational model useless? Uhhh. okay. You can have that victory I guess. pats your head.
- skore 14y agoYour recurring "rebuttal" to somebody posting a reply to your argument is to say that your point is right, that he is 'deeply confused', that he is arguing from authority, ignoring mathematical principles, that he is hysterical, that he doesn't read his own links, that he is making a fool of himself by not understanding what he has linked to himself. Up to this point, you don't use a single word to actually provide any substance at all to your argument. Then, finally, you actually do address one of his points in the most dismissive and condescending way I have seen all day. Kudos, I guess. No substance and all hot air. Somewhere halfway through your silly dance, irony ate its own hat.
- TheZenPsycho 14y ago
- ucee054 14y agoOh I forgot to add, the rules of relational database are exactly what CODD said they are because CODD invented them and said "I define the relational model to be this" What they are NOT is what you, Chris Date and Fabian Pascal want them to be. And no-one is going to use Tutorial-D ever, so it's about time you made your peace with SQL.