On Tue, Mar 9, 2010 at 10:32 AM, Edward Potter <edwardpot...@gmail.com> wrote: > So full normalization is no longer the non plus ultra of database design? > __________________________________ > Once the cost of everything went zero, that was pretty much the end of > 'normalization' > Just throw everything now into a blob of ooze. Get to stuff u need, forget > everything else. Once u leaped into OO, organic models come into play. > Right, like everything we were taught is pretty much irrelevant now: just > thow it into into the ooze. WTF? Who cares? Why waste the energy? Just toss > it into the cloud. > Yipes! ;-) > I guess being up on Core Data is a required skill. That framework is insanly > great.
Yeah, those bozos at Facebook, LinkedIn, Yahoo, and Google have no idea what they are talking about. 3rd normal form was good for our dads, and it's good for us too! Seriously though: Take whatever popular PHP CMS you might have laying around, and consider what it would take to migrate content from one existing website to another website that also already has its own content... I'm willing to bet all that data is "unique" to a bunch of incrementally selected, absolutely meaningless integers. Both databases are certain to have collisions with all those auto_increment columns. If the design had instead stuck to uniqueness (hey, sounds a lot like what a Primary Key is!) then you would only have collisions with content having the same title, for example. But instead, you're certain to have an article with an id of 1 on both systems (despite being completely different content), same goes for id of 2, 3, 4, and so on... In the end you have to provide logic to your export/import process that first pulls all of these meaningless pseudo-PKs and inserts each content item one at a time, and then providing the necessary linkage to menus, categories, etc. because they also relied on a bunch of totally nonrelated, pseudo-PKs. Go ahead and dismiss my points if you want - this point is a very valid one, one that I initially dismissed as well. Looks like you're making the same mistake :^P -- Mitch _______________________________________________ New York PHP Users Group Community Talk Mailing List http://lists.nyphp.org/mailman/listinfo/talk http://www.nyphp.org/Show-Participation
