Hi Jim I'm 100% in agreement with you.
> <<Bull!>> Expected that response. <g> > Like I said, I've been down this road<g>. I explained this same issue to Drew Speedie long ago. He had been doing the OTLT - One True Lookup Table for years and never wondered about it. He agreed it was probably wrong, but he didn't change the MaxFrame samples because he had bigger fish to fry. Tamar Granor recently told me I normalize code like I normalize tables. I look for "entities" and encapsulate them. Even part of a line of code can qualify. What is an entity? That's hard to describe. Parts and Companies are obviously entities. Salutations and Shipping Types are entities. "Lookups" is a merely a collection of different types of entities. Normalization is not a matter of someone's opinion. I'm often amazed how some people have conclusions about computer science theory, and, without having any thing to verify their positions, hold to them. Sounds like religion to me. I had a huge difference of opinion with some guys over "cohesion" and "coupling". Ended up writing a big article on the topic. http://advisor.com/doc/17117 Unfortunately I've learned no matter what, you just can't convince some people. If this article from the much revered and respected Joe Celko doesn't convince a person, you're probably wasting your time. :) http://www.dbazine.com/ofinterest/oi-articles/celko22 Mike > <<Trust me they are all Normalized to a single table>> > > No, they are not. Let me ask you a question. Let's say you currently > have salutations and shipping types in a single lookup table. Your are asked > to add a shipping and handling charge based on the shipment type (ie. UPS > ground, Air, etc). Do you: > > 1. Add a column in your lookup table to hold the S&H charge and leave it > NULL for every lookup that is not of the type "Shipping" > > Or > > 2. Do you break out the shipping lookups into a separate table. If so, why? > > Also one of the things I'd like to add is that you must keep in mind is > that relational theory is actually a branch of mathmatics. It doesn't exist > becasuse of computer database systems, but it is applied to them. To make > that clearer, if I wanted to track data using nothing more then a > chalkboard, I could do so and still apply relational theory to the process. > Absolutely. Nicely put. _______________________________________________ Post Messages to: [email protected] Subscription Maintenance: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profox OT-free version of this list: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profoxtech Searchable Archive: http://leafe.com/archives/search/profox This message: http://leafe.com/archives/byMID/profox/[EMAIL PROTECTED] ** All postings, unless explicitly stated otherwise, are the opinions of the author, and do not constitute legal or medical advice. This statement is added to the messages for those lawyers who are too stupid to see the obvious.
