On Tuesday 10 February 2009 12:05 am, [email protected] wrote: > ive asked this question a half a dozen different ways and none have > ever gotten an answer.
(Just an aside--is everybody switching to top posting--where's the context, what's the question--must I read the rest of the post to find the question? (Sorry, I'm in a funky mood, on another list I read, some guy quoted a long post, and somewhere in the middle of it posted a short phrase response (less than a line). What a pain.) Anyway, after skimming the rest of the post, I'm not entirely sure of your question: * do you want pointers on how to search for "sparse tables" on google, or * do you want help on storing "variable column sparse tables"--ahh, I didn't see the variable column part the first time I skimmed Anyway, before I saw that, I was going to say that a relational data base (which is what Rails uses (iiuc, something like MySQL, Postgresql (??), or whatever, is something like a sparse table because tables don't have to be "complete"--for example, if the key field is some numerical index, you can have records 001, 006, and 046--you don't have to have a line for every record from 001 thru 046. But I guess that's not what you mean by "variable column sparse tables". So what do you mean? You mean where (starting with my sparse example above ;-), some records (lines) do not have a value for every column? Maybe something like this: View in fixed font: key lastname firstname height weight hatsize shoesize 001 Mattia Frank 5'11" 7 1/4 10 006 Doe John 5'6" 165 046 Jane 5'5" If that's what you're looking for, as far as I know, tables like this can exist in a relational data base and not really cause any problem. A pedant would (I think) make some comment about the data not being fully normalized, and maybe some slightly less efficiency that would be experienced if you had many (i.e., thousands, millions) of such records. OTOH, normalizing the database (typically) takes effort both by the programmer / database administrator and in the database itself (running queries or whatever to actually accomplish the normalization, so for small quantities of data (I would argue that) it is not efficient to normalize the data. > > afaik i need a table for my rows > > a table for my columns > > a table for cells. > > and a table of "tables" I haven't thought through what the above is about, but at a quick skim it sounds like the kind of tables and effort that would be needed to normalize the database. Like I said, for some definitions of small, this is counterproductive for small quantities of data (imho). If your question is something else, maybe you can clarify. Randy Kramer -- I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I created a video instead.--with apologies to Cicero, et.al. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ruby on Rails: Talk" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/rubyonrails-talk?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
