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I agree that relational models have everything to do with deduplication. It is one area where purity in mathematics translates well to solving practical proble

I agree that relational models have everything to do with deduplication. It is one area where purity in mathematics translates well to solving practical problems. It is often the case that the theoretic models of computation or storage translate very poorly to everyday use. If they can be represented, they are done so at cost, and are therefore not applied. Maybe I'm a pessimist, but I argue that, while normalization does do nice things for data consistency, people often use/used it because of disk storage savings. In my experience, they rarely, if ever, achieve a high enough level of normalization to get much benefit.

dragontamer 12y ago
I mainly study publicly known databases for this sort of stuff. I'm not a professional web developer, but I do what I can to keep up with technology. From this perspective, we can study Wikipedia's schema. As far as I can tell, the schema is designed for data consistency. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/36/Mediawiki_database_Schema.svg http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/36/Mediawiki... As far as I can tell, Wikipedia is mostly operating in 3rd normal form (or higher), the general standard that most places go to. (6th normal form is the ultimate that no one bothers to get to). Besides, just because Relational Databases offer an easy path to normalization doesn't mean you have to use it. If you want to minimize the number of joins in your database for some reason, 1st normal form (aka: no normalization what-so-ever) is always available. Only recommended if joins really are becoming a problem though. ---------------- Besides, Relational Databases are hardly the most efficient at disk space. Every index, foreign key constraint or check condition often adds a ton of data to every datum. I'd argue that Key-Value stores are the most efficient at disk space usage. Certainly more-efficient than your typical relational database IMO.

dragontamer 12y ago

I mainly study publicly known databases for this sort of stuff. I'm not a professional web developer, but I do what I can to keep up with technology. From this perspective, we can study Wikipedia's schema. As far as I can tell, the schema is designed for data consistency. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/36/Mediawiki_database_Schema.svg http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/36/Mediawiki... As far as I can tell, Wikipedia is mostly operating in 3rd normal form (or higher), the general standard that most places go to. (6th normal form is the ultimate that no one bothers to get to). Besides, just because Relational Databases offer an easy path to normalization doesn't mean you have to use it. If you want to minimize the number of joins in your database for some reason, 1st normal form (aka: no normalization what-so-ever) is always available. Only recommended if joins really are becoming a problem though. ---------------- Besides, Relational Databases are hardly the most efficient at disk space. Every index, foreign key constraint or check condition often adds a ton of data to every datum. I'd argue that Key-Value stores are the most efficient at disk space usage. Certainly more-efficient than your typical relational database IMO.