Gene Wirchenko wrote:

I disagree because the Humpty person is neither here nor practising any
sort of mysticism I can discern. That person has a single relation with
a single name. The name does not magically cause a need for a second
relation. The Alice character on the other hand...

Lawpoop,

From your description it seems to me that the poster would like to use
something quite simple, such as a wizard-generated bulk mailing which
for example is available in MS Word. Usually such data source is a
single table in MS Word, MS Excel or any database query on MS Access
or superior systems.

I agree that the single table solution will not scale up well, is not
properly normalized, but as you stated the OP was not interested in
that and apparently had no need for it.

I would therefore vote for that beeing a misunderstanding of some
kind.

brgds

Philipp Post

Philipp Post wrote:

How do you figure that?

And how do you figure that?

If we get to vote on this, I vote that you're leaping to
entirely random conclusions.

--
Roy

If the requirements for this solution will be extended, you will have
to go splitting up that single table into two or more, depending on
the attributes on hand.

From what we have to guess from the description of the OP. E. g.
{donation_nbr, donator_name, donator_address, donation_amt,
donation_date}

As random as possible based on what we were told about this case.

brgds

Philipp Post

Snipped

by attempting to establish a relationship between a logical design
effort (a process called normalization) and a vague implementation
physical performance concept related to a direct image systems's
ilmitation called scaling up (related to the increase in time of
number of physical rows stored on disk and its impact on response
time).

Since you obviously ignore the difference between the two concepts
(also called independence between the logical and physical layer of
database modeling), I doubt that anything you are posting will add
anything of value since your premice is based on utter ignorance of
database design...

Philipp Post wrote:

Although that is not the usual notion of what it means to "scale up"
I guessed that's probably what you had in mind. But in the absence of
any good reason to prefer one random guess at a future conceptual model
over any other, you are just firing from the hip and not improving the
design.

Well, with just as much justification, my guess is that the OP's single
table is already 5NF.

--
Roy