Mark Johnson wrote:

HI Mark, thanks for your response...

I have no idea what you mean here, nor by the horse race thing which
you've made my original post into... 8)

One way pointer? Are you telling me that parent child relationships
within a table are something one should not do? How does one then
establish a hierarchy between items that are the same data entity, for
example, say in an equipment table in which a motor is a child of an air
handling unit or fan and an on/off switch is a child of that motor?


--
Tim http://www.ucs.mun.ca/~tmarshal/
^o<
/#) "Burp-beep, burp-beep, burp-beep?" - Quaker Jake
/^^ "Whatcha doin?" - Ditto "TIM-MAY!!" - Me

-CELKO- wrote:

Hi,

er, no, I'm not sure where to go from here... Do you mean MS SQL? Or
just SQL, period... I cringe to say this, but I'm not familiar with
these concepts. Well, that's wrong, I'm of course familiar with the
concept of a tree and hierarchy, but, I'm guessing by hte way you've
capitalized these, I should be focusing my attention on these concepts
as laid out by the relational model, no?

--
Tim http://www.ucs.mun.ca/~tmarshal/
^o<
/#) "Burp-beep, burp-beep, burp-beep?" - Quaker Jake
/^^ "Whatcha doin?" - Ditto "TIM-MAY!!" - Me

"Tony Andrews" <andrewst (AT) onetel (DOT) com> wrote:

I'm pretty sure. Some of those punch card programs ran hundreds of
cards. As cliched as the joke is, I'm sure one or more people dropped
their boxes of cards on the way to the old central computer card
readers. It's a lot to resort, if, assuming if, the cards were not
otherwise numbered in order.

The problem appears to be that in order to think in terms of sets and
the 'new math', that some are driven to defend it to an absurd degree,
claiming that proper order is essentially irrelevant. And I've simply
tried to offer numerous examples showing that proper order is
essential to most all data. However accounted, in a database, that
order must be accounted. Other examples were a roster of US
Presidents, start and finish positions in a horse race, literally the
order of words and phrases in these very messages back and forth, and
so on.

"Marshall Spight" <marshall.spight (AT) gmail (DOT) com> wrote:

The consensus among a few who keep posting these sort of abusive
messages, you mean, attacking me personally simply because you might
have talked yourself into an embarrassing corner, or otherwise find
yourself confused for whatever other reasons? If you made mistakes, so
be it. Learn from them. Don't attack the messenger. And if you feel
you tried to make a point until you were 'blue in the face', then so
be it, and possibly it's just my loss. But calling me names is simply
childish. It's pointless. And you should know better.

You've been told this, now, a number of times.

Tim Marshall <TIMMY!@PurplePandaChasers.Moertherium> wrote:

I'm saying it's something that those who insist that the table IS a
relation, rather than something based on it, would say violates the
rules.

And parts lists are a typical example, because you don't know what the
next subcategory will be, or if the vendor or client start moving
everything around. It's tedious, but can be accomodated with just
manual drag n drop in a tree-view listing. Rearranging tables to
account, not merely adding some in addition, and removing others,
might actually seem more error-prone, even if whatever updates were
required were left to SQL queries, and ought to be in any case.

I'm not saying - don't do it. I would suggest most everyone uses such
tables. It's an accomplished fact. I'm just saying that in doing this,
it goes against the theory which supposedly lies behind these various
commercial databases. And it introduces problems of its own, potential
errors which the same folks would eagerly warn against, and without an
explicit path for each node, is dependent on the efficiency of the
implementation of chain/link reconstruction by something like Connect
By, or whatever is on your system. It just becomes a practical
consideration as to whether once the dataset reaches a certain bulk,
if retrieval becomes prohibitively slow, as one important
consideration. Retrieval delay. But in particular if this is a
database that is not used to generate oddly structured reports, or
which would have to retrieve a lot of data on a regular basis, but
where the consideration is more entry and inserting the information
just as archive, then perhaps even that wouldn't pose a problem.

Tim Marshall wrote:
I wouldn't worry man. You don't seem to be the only one who his
nonsense is confusing.

Tim Marshall wrote:
I'm not sure you got a response to this, Tim. Celko is referring to
his book with that title. It has helped many folks with
implementations of hierarchies using various SQL DBMS's. You might
want to give it a look. Cheers! --dawn

"jason.glumidge (AT) gmail (DOT) com" <Jason.Glumidge (AT) gmail (DOT) com> wrote:

This wasn't addressed to you. And you didn't need to post this
nonsense. And there's an entire thread, here, called the horse race.
That was the reference. If you don't understand the issues, that's one
thing. I understand. But you don't take potshots at people,
particularly in such hit n run trollish fashion. Now you know.

Mark Johnson wrote:
But the key word here was COUNT. You are saying that items have to be
"in order" to be able to COUNT them? If so, how do you count your
pennies when you empty your piggy bank, given that pennies don't have
serial numbers and don't have an intrinsic "order"?

I am sure nobody sensible (and I know that includes Marshall) would
claim that order is never important. I think what is claimed is that
(a) sets are not intrinsically ordered, and (b) sets can nevertheless
be used to store data which may then be ordered, perhaps in more than
one way. For example, you could list the horses in the race in order
of finish position, or in order of horse's name - all from the same
intrinsically unordered set of data. Do you not agree?

"Tony Andrews" <andrewst (AT) onetel (DOT) com> wrote:

You just said that. That's not even barely implied in anything you
quoted. The issue was whether or not data, in this case a set of
punched cards, were in their proper order, and therefore useful.


He has. That's what was so incomprehensible. The idea was apparently
to defend some notion of disorder, or at least the irrelevancy of
proper order. Sets are said to be unordered, therefore order is
irrelevant, something like that. I told him that's not necessarily
what the 'new math' says. So it led to a defense of disorder to the
extent of posting stanzas from a poem, but completely out of order,
and then saying it looked just fine - no harm, no foul. And I offered
a host of counter-examples, not the least of which were these very
messages if you take into account the order of the paragraphs, and the
order of words and phrases within each sentence. I took to rearranging
some and pointing out that even if they seemed to mean something
semantically, or were barely syntactically, correct that at the very
least this was not the original meaning. That data was lost.

But as you say, this is something so patently obvious that it - need
not be said. I was stunned to see that sort of thing, not in one
message, but in entire subthreads.


But that goes to my original question. If you have a binary relation
of President's surname and the order in which he served, do you still
insist that such is intrinsically unordered, or that it is simply an
ordered set? It seems like semantic wordplay, to me. You say the table
cannot be ordered because it's a set. You say a table with nothing but
order and ranking is a set, and therefore is not ordered. It's
conveniently self-referential. It's a Catch-22. I say, if it looks to
be in order, even if one could treat it otherwise, if the data only
makes sense in that particular order, then it can be said to be
intrinsically ordered. And you say, no, see above.

I would agree that one could reductively, but only reductively, claim
that the internal representation in storage, the machine
representation, is unordered. That's only obvious. One could store P,
from the Pyramids, over here, and "mids", somewhere else, for that
matter. But the machine doesn't understand the semantics, and only the
syntax which is necessarily programmed into it for this task. It's a
practical matter. It will change with the machine that's used. The
bits of information could be spread out and dissected in any order or
'bank', whatsoever. You point to the cards fallen on the floor and say
- see. It's all there. But that's exactly the problem. I say that they
have become useless unless placed in proper order. That order is
intrinsically part of the data, and the data cannot be represented in
any other order. If it is, the program won't run. At best you could
use it to count cards, or for some other purpose, such as counting
various frequencies among cards. But - the thing, the entity - is no
longer that thing. You may say, sure it is. And there we are.