Plural or singular table names

#71

Quote:

Why is Personnel better than Employees? Are you talking about
people who might work for the entity but not be paid (as an example,

I am writing a
system for An Óige, the Irish youth hostel organisation and there are
some volunteer workers there)? <<

I am just giving an example of the words; I am not working from an
actual logical model developed from an actual requirement. If
Volunteers are logically different from other personnel, then they get
another table with constraints for their business rules.

Quote:

How about if it's only a table to do with pay?

So name it something like "SalarySchedule" -- a schedule being a
collective noun.

Quote:

Suppose that you have a table called "Employee_who_died_on_duty"
.... would you give that a plural name or what?

Being dead is an attribute, so it should not be modeled as a table.
But I'd go with "DeceasedPersonnel" if I had to. Unless of course we
only had one dead guy in the company, then Employee_who_died_on_duty"
might be okay if verbose.

Quote:

Again, I fail to see why. A collection (set) of trees is not
necessarily a forest, but a forest is by definition a set of trees?

Again, it is an example of word choices and I don't have a
specification or logical model. But you do understand that "Tree" is
a singular occurrence, while "Forest", "Orchard" and "Timberyard" are
collective and imply a set of such things with the implication that
the set itself has properties that we need to model (i.e. "Orchard"
implies fruit and nut trees that yield a crop; "Timberyard" impies
timber to be processed).

#72

"Bob Badour" <bbadour (AT) golden (DOT) net> wrote

Quote:

I don't find anything inelegant or fuzzy about the verb to have.

I should say ambiguous.

I have a house
I have a brain (like new

I have a girlfriend
I have a headache
I have doubts
I have that kind of behavior
I have an argument
I have a lunch
etc

Which have is yours?

Quote:

Relation is actually more elegant and proper. Relationship is usually
reserved for relations among people, but english speakers find relationship
very familiar and relation quite strange. Most english speakers are more
familiar with the noun relation as a synonym for the noun relative.

Thanks for the clarification

Regards
Alfredo

#73

"Bob Badour" <bbadour (AT) golden (DOT) net> wrote

Quote:

Relational operations on vales does not infer constaints. Constraints
are checked in assignment operations (database updates).

Thus you are saying that a constraint affects the declared type of a
variable

Yes, or in other words a constraints affects the database type.

Quote:

and that constraint inference only applies to operations on
variables by which the dbms derives additional variables.

Yes.

Quote:

What I meant is that pi and 3 are different values.

And each has a unique MST.

In a legal type hierarchy according to the D&D model.

It is trivially true because having a unique MST is a prescription for
that model, and any type hierarchy in which a value has not a unique
MST is automatically illegal.

Eg:

type a = is integer constraint (a = 3) or (a = 4);
type b = is integer constraint (b = 2) or (b = 3);

Illegal.

Quote:

The declarations above do not declare variables, and I maintain that the
value 3 has a unique most specific type.

In the D&D model it is true, but we could develop another model in
which a value may not have a unique MST.

Regards
Alfredo

#74

"Costin Cozianu" <c_cozianu (AT) hotmail (DOT) com> wrote

Quote:

Do you want the type system for the primitive values to be different
from the type system for relations, arrays and other "complex" types ?

Different how?

It's not clear to me that a good system for user defined types
(or scalars or classes or whatever one wants to call them) is
also good system for relation types. There are differences
that I don't know how to reconcile.

Then again, I'm still reading a lot of books, so maybe I'll
come across something.

Marshall

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Plural or singular table names

comp.databases.theory comp.databases.theory

Re: Plural or singular table names - 09-13-2003 , 06:11 PM

Re: Values have types ?? - 09-15-2003 , 11:58 AM

Re: Plural or singular table names - 09-17-2003 , 08:49 AM

Re: Values have types ?? - 09-20-2003 , 01:17 PM