Re: Nearest Common Ancestor Report (XDb1's $1000 Challenge)

> "brown", "brown" and "brown" ... No redundancy there.

Interesting.

> The word "brown" is not a fact. The statements "my name is Brown",
> "my dog is brown" and "John's car is brown" are 3 distinct facts.

I do not know what your definition of a fact is, so according to your definition, you may be correct. I do know that all of them are things and in the context of storing things (ie data, schema, facts, values, etc) in a db, "my dog is brown" is a distinct thing from "brown" which is yet distinct from the following things: "b", "r", "o", "w" and "n".

Per C. J. Date's, "An Intro to Db Systems", 6th Ed, Chapter 10 - Further Normalization, pg 312, "the purpose of such reduction is to avoid redundancy, and hence to avoid certain update anomalies". If the example data is entered in RM Sol#1 or 2, "brown" is stored three times (once in T_thing, and twice in T_attribute_value). Changing any one of them and not the others, creates an update anomaly.

> Do you seriously believe that Date or Codd would support your warped
> definition?

Yes, because it isn't warp. Received on Wed Jun 09 2004 - 18:43:00 CEST