Relational is/was a way for humans to understand how computers could organise data. From a day back when disks were expensive. --LinkedIn.com

How Google Will Use Firebase to Supercharge Its Cloud Computing

Calendar supertype

On Persistence and Data Management

John Cleese on the Black Knight and Douglas Adams' High Heels

White House exempts Syria airstrikes from tight standards on civilian deaths

• Iranian Supreme Leader calls for Israel's 'annihilation'

by Erwin Smout

1. Multisets

It is beyond any doubt that set is the basis of mass data computation. Although SQL has the concept of set, it is limited to describing simple result set, and it does not take the set as a basic data type to enlarge its application scope.

Platfora’s mission is to empower customers to transform their businesses into fact-based enterprises. Platfora's Big Data Analytics Platform masks the complexity of Hadoop, making it easy for customers to understand all the facts in their business... --Platfora.com

Q: I don't know what the different between detect inference in database and prevent it, any help?
A: Why would you want to prevent inferences that a DMBS makes? That's where the power of it is. --LinkedIn.com

Graphs: A Better Database Abstraction

• Should the move from a fixed schema truly be to “no schema”
• The fine line between “informality” and “loss of intellectual rigor

You Too May Be A Victim Of Developaralysis

• Must watch: State Legislatures and ALEC

• Fascinating: Ebru Art,Sand Art

• About The PostWest

If they do this:

Fatah official calls for blood to 'purify' Jerusalem of Jews

PA airs 'anti-Semitic' film as tensions mount in Jerusalem

Four killed in terror attack at Jerusalem synagogue

then obviously we should do this:

Croatia likely to recognize Palestine as a state MidEast

Sweden To Recognize State Of Palestine

Spanish Parliament Calls on Rajoy to Recognize Palestine

UK lawmakers vote to recognize Palestine as a state

and this

EU threatens 'further action' to protect two-state solution

EU considering 'sanctions' against Israel over settlements

• Data Sublanguage Parts 1-2

Those who argue for natural keys typically do so from a position of philosophical purity, as is the case in the Simple Talk article you cited. In my (25+) years of experience, people who argue from this position are long on education and short on real-world experience. In the real world just about every natural key I've ever come across is subject to duplication and/or redefinition. There are very few cases outside of smallish code tables where it is practical to take the philosophical high ground regarding natural keys. --StackExchange.com

R2G a Tool for Migrating Relations to Graphs

• Using tools without foundation knowledge will mislead
• Inheritance in relational database

The Delusions of Big Data

Ebola-- Failures of Imagination

Can you detect the stealth animals hiding in all these pictures?

• Baby killed as car rams crowd in Jerusalem terror attack
• Palestinians pelt Jerusalem kindergarten with rocks

Irish parliament calls on government to recognize Palestine

Pat Condell: 'Boo Hoo Palestine'

Q: What's the key technical skills for Data Modeling? 
A: Erwin or Rational or phycial [sic] modelling or conceptual modelling or Logical modelling. --LinkedIn.com 

NULL means data is not available, nothing more...--LinkedIn.com

On a Pile of ... what?

• Paper #6 has been published
• Which NF is violated if subtype attributes are rolled up into the Supertype?
• Weak Entities, Referential Constraints & Normalization

• An open letter to L.Bass by E.W. Dijkstra
• Zeno's Tortoise by D. McGoveran

• Mob vandalizes Crown Heights kosher market
• France to host Palestinian unity government
• Talk of 'Jewish lobby' surfaces during UK Palestine vote
• Israel fails to tie rebuilding Gaza to disarming Hamas
• 'Post-sanctions' Iran conference in London

The Bible's Buried Secrets

 by Erwin Smout and Fabian Pascal

"To be as precise as we possibly can is not a luxurious mannerism that the academic prig can afford himself in his (supposedly!) sheltered environment; for people facing the problems of "the real world" it is a Must." --E.W. Dijkstra, An Open Letter to L. Bass

The computing power of SQL for mass structured data is complete, that is to say, it is impossible to find anything that SQL cannot compute. But its support layer is too low, which can lead to over-elaborate operation in practical application.

• My old TechTarget column Against the Grain
• David McGoveran's new publications page

I am teaching a database design course next year. What do you think should be covered in an introductory course? --LinkedIn.com

I have a requirement for an ERwin data modeler (Logical, Physical, 3NF and Star Schema). --LinkedIn.com

What would be key entities in Automotive Industry MDM

• Wow Apple Runs 75,000+ nodes on Apache Cassandra
• Procedural vs. Declarative languages
• The role of data modeling in Big Data, massive parallelism and the “cloud”

Out of the Tar Pit

Ig Nobel Prize Winners

Hey There Little Electron, Why Won't You Tell Me Where You Came From

Israel is holding back channel talks with the 'Palestinian Authority' relating to Gaza, in which it is making concessions and receiving nothing in return.

The Tower cites a Wall Street Journal report that indicates that Western negotiators are so desperate for a deal with Iran that they are offering more significant sanctions relief for a deal that would not stop Iran from developing nuclear weapons.

The Wired article Ex-Googler Shares His Big-Data Secrets With the Masses touts a new tool that "mimics the way web giants like Google and Facebook rapidly analyze enormous amounts of online information." The article calls the tool "simple for analysts to query data from anywhere in a company with a single tool, regardless of where that data is stored, without the need to learn new programming languages."

Further to that point, in my mind you can have a database that is both relational and schema-less, in the sense that it is relational if the only thing in it is relations but it is schema-less if any data updating operation is allowed to change the number or degree etc of said relations, rather than that being reserved for so called data-definition operations. --LinkedIn.com

Turning dirty data words into sweet talk

Gardner to DBAs, BI Vendors Reinvent Yourselves

• The role of data modeling in the coming move to Big Data, massive parallelism, and the “cloud”
• The fine line between “informality” and “loss of intellectual rigor
• The impact of social media technologies on data modeling

Unskilled and Unaware of It

How Our Botched Understanding of Science Ruins Everything

John Oliver: Nuclear Weapons

Freaky Physics Experiment May Prove Our Universe Is A Two-Dimensional Hologram

PA: Israelis Must Return to Their Countries of Origin

• Gaza Schoolchildren Traumatized by Sounds of Hamas Torture 
• More on child terrorists in Gaza
• 12-year old Gaza boy, playing resistance, dies digging a tunnel

US Providing Indirect Military Aid to Hezbollah

Go Easy on Iran So It Fights ISIS? That's Absurd

World Council of Churches Demands Israel Release Terrorists

• Added a LINKS page to the top site menu, with links to items I deem worth reading. Added a few from my old site and new ones will be added as I come across them.
• Overhauled the FUNDAMENTALS list of sources at the right of the HOME page. It now includes links to the bibliographies of E. F. Codd, D. McGoveran, C. J. Date, H. Darwen and myself. 

The future in data modeling is Object Role Modeling (ORM).  It is a far superior way to approach data modeling (compared to any record-based methods such as relational) that avoids all the pitfalls of "Table Think" and the necessity of normalization. --LinkedIn.com

Survey data model, what is the best approach?

Dr. Robin Bloor: Big Data is “nonsense”

• On the foolishness of natural language programming
• UK's National Health Service Moves To NoSQL

Senator Challenges Zuckerberg

The Exorcisms of Anneliese Michel

• Those Who Forget the Past ...
• The Price of Denial
• Qatar's Peace Makers
• Israeli Occupation? No, Arab!
• Obama’s plan is unreal for lack of military muscle
• The Undermining of Western Education
• What the Palestinians Really Want
• What Else is New?
• Who are the Palestinians
• Let's Give Them a State

Weak Entities, Referential Constraints and the Conceptual-Logical Conflation

I use the word grain in the same sense as Kimball although I use it across Facts and Dimensions. I like the term over things like Uniqueness, Constraint, Key because it is a term that business readily understand, and can be used prior to the formal identification of a final key. In Dimensional Modelling it is a best practice for the Fact tables to have such a grain (a composite key across associated Dimensions) and is also necessary for many Dimensions (to assist with updates, type-2 logic etc.) - to the point where it is a best practice to identify the grain (Row Natural Key, Source Id, etc.) of the Dimension. The use of a surrogate key on either Dimensions or Facts must be backed by this level of rigor if data integrity is to be maintained. It also forces modeller consideration of source system issues such as multi-source key uniqueness, reuse of keys, deletions, etc. To clarify a little on Dimensions, the grain of an example type-1 customer dimension would be 'a customer id', the grain of an example type 2 customer dimension would be 'a customer id + as at time'. So 'grain' means the defined uniqueness for a row in the table. Generally, this also has the advantage of calling out poorly designed structures that have not established their relational uniqueness correctly - the cause of the irritating duplicate row issue in a Surrogate Key-oriented Fact table.--LinkedIn.com

• help me i was designing the database

• First normal form question
• The 'Real World' and Database Design
• Data Model: Neither Conceptual, Nor Logical, Nor Physical

Inside The Mind Of Leonardo

• Matt Taibbi: DIVIDE - AMERICAN INJUSTICE IN THE AGE OF THE WEALTH GAP
• Michael Lewis: FLASH BOYS

• Holocaust Inversion: “Gaza = Auschwitz”
• Obama’s Irrational Animus for Israel
• Allah_Islam: Say Goodbye to Europe and Civilization
• Israel and the PostWest: Denial, Illusion & Delusion
• It's The Jews, Stupid!

Invoice number is the key (key is not unique in this table). Although structure or key constraints doesn't enforce uniqueness of rows, the assumption is there will not be duplicate rows. --LinkedIn.com

Relational Queries by Reference

What is Weak Subtype

Tim's Vermeer

• ISIS Bad, Hamas OK: Only One Difference
• Efraim Karsh: It's Anti-Semitism, Stupid
• Pinch Me
• The West Prefers to Deplore Dead Jews To Letting Them Defend Themselves
• Israel and the Arabs in War: Two observations
• Just Sayin'
• Obama to Israel: Do As I Say, Not As We Do
• Cairo talks: Deja Vu
• Reality Check
• Gaza Blame: Upside Down and Backwards

Q: In a nutshell, what does RDF based Linked Data facilitate?
A: The ability to find and describe stuff using attributes (relations, properties, features, fields, characteristics). --LinkedIn.com

Data Model now offers Relationship Modeling

Data Vaults - Why Or Why Not

• Conceptual vs. logical modeling, part III
• Conceptual vs. Logical modeling, part IV   

• fail to show my facts to be false; or, if they are true, that my conclusions do not follow;
• are posted anonymously

Don't confuse Data(base) Modeling with Business Modeling. All DBA are correct when they are talking about Database Modeling. If you want to ensure unique record on Business level, just add a unique composite index. (not as Key). But far to often, a unique record on business level is not ALWAYS unique (only most of the time) --LinkedIn.com

Create database vs schema

• Big data means the reign of the relational database is over
• Conceptual Muddling and Database Kludges
• What do Data Scientists and Unicorns have in Common

• Conceptual vs. logical modeling, part II
• Conceptual vs. Logical modeling (once again)

• S.F. housing prices bidding wars fiercer than ever
• Pinterest Threatens Long-Time San Francisco Tenants With Eviction
• San Francisco Protests at the Home & Office of David McCloskey
• San Francisco's guerrilla protest at Google buses swells
• Few applicants for blue-collar jobs in S.F.
• Shame of the City-Homeless in San Francisco
• A decade of homelessness - Thousands in S.F. remain in crisis
• AngelHack CEO's Attack On Homeless
• S.F. to offer George Lucas prime lot for his museum

Google Exec Rises Ire in Portland

R: Unless the need is for ACID compliant transactions, denormalization is generally not considered logically, physically or whatever-ally-–so essentially a thoroughly normalized mode is relevant for a write-infrequently consumption of data and data integrity can be guaranteed by design.

Mathematically, a relation on domains—which are sets of values of a type—is a subset of the Cartesian product of the domains.

NoSQL usant correct m'y indeed totof n'y most of the dev ans devops who clearly thing nosql Means they will ne a le to do whatever they wants ans still have answers to their twisted query in a correct time. Those people see nosql as the mean to get ris of DBAs. And il not kiddin since it's happening right now un many companies i know of. --LinkedIn.com

Architecting IMS for Big Data - a symbiotic relationship.

• Database Design Patterns
• Will Pattern Discovery Systems Trump Analyst's Rules-Based Models
• How do we do data modeling in NoSQL DB and Big Data

IEEE Computer Issue on CAP Theorem

• Beyonce and Miley Cyrus studies offered at US colleges
• Better than Scientology: The new Zuckerberg-based religion

Logical design is where the Architect defines entities (which will become tables in a database), attributes (which will become columns in a database), etc. This is typically the level that SMEs are most comfortable. I think that a Logical design may deal with data types and keys, but it does not cater to any specific platform or engine.
Physical design is where the Architect translates the logical design into tables, columns, datatype specifics like INT versus NUMERIC, indexes, partitions, etc. This is where "the rubber meets the road" and the logical design gets mapped into a form that can exist and be tested on a database server.
While I'm sure that someone will object to this link on religious grounds, the discussion  does a pretty good job of making the distinctions that concern me. --LinkedIn.com

MyBatis Schema Migration System

"From the department of "we haven't really thought this feature through" comes this gem, one of several schema migration systems that allow "reverse migrations" or "downward migrations". Whereas a forward migration creates tables, columns, etc., a reverse migration drops them. The video proudly shows them "reverse migrating" their database until all tables are dropped. Another vendor patiently explains why they don't offer this feature."

• Is the Relational Data Model Spent?
• 4 Table Types you Need to Scale a Relational Database
• A data model of the SAP Bill of Material Explosion tables
• What are people's opinions on nosql
• Is Data Science a combination of Data Architecture and System Engineering?

The Death Of Expertise

• Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel 'mortified and embarrassed' over leaked emails
• Police-friendly tech CEO charged with hit-and-run
• Billionaire claims he owns the road, the beach and the tides
• Mystery millionaire hides $100 bills around US city ...
• Perkins On 'Nazi' Quote Inequality

Codd's relational model is based on set theory, and set theory simply doesn't work for database systems. It can't, for example, model a gum ball machine. Gum balls, you see, have only one attribute, which is color (gum balls don't have names, serial numbers, bar codes, or URLs). If you put 200 gum balls in a gum ball machine, the gum ball machines contains 200 gum balls. If you try to put 200 gum balls in a gum ball relation, you get a relation of 5 gum balls (the number of colors) and 195 duplicate errors. If you then take 5 gum balls out of the gum ball machine, it still contains 195 gum balls. If you take 5 gum balls out of the gum ball relation, it goes empty. --Jim Starkey, LinkedIn.com

How to store and document large data models

• How Many Data Model Layers Are Useful?
• Why Don't DBAs Join the NoSQL Revolution
• SQL NULL problems in analytics 

Software engineers think they're amazingly great 

• Pope John Paul II no saint, covered up sin
• Cardinal's vast luxury apartment in Vatican
• Man crushed to death by giant crucifix dedicated to Pope 

L: I realize that you have taken much further what Codd wrote on the first page of his 1970 paper but it's still remarkable how many people in the data business are not able to refer to, let alone talk productively, about his "natural structure of data". And many treat RT as a fait accompli when it is still evolving, not to mention those who, as you've pointed out many times, treat SQL gizmos such as outer join as if they come from RT when they don't.

"Big Data may offer analytical insights, but with almost certainty will produce really big lies from 100% correct data", particularly when data are from external sources. This presentation will demonstrate

• Why and how
• How to protect yourself

Q: How do we do data modeling in NoSQL DB and Big Data??? 
A: Define the schema hierarchically so that the tables in the schema including ER form a forest using a parent relationship i.e. each table has at most one parent key. Now the data retrieval and storage is done using these parent or ancestor keys. Look for google datastore documentation for more details. --LinkedIn.com

Is the Relational Data Model Spent?

Do graph databases deprecate relational databases?

• One in four Americans 'do not know the Earth circles the Sun'
• Rich should get more votes, says billionaire Tom Perkins

• Why and how
• How to protect yourself

Missing Data, Databases & Analytics

Q: Is it necessary to follow standards during SQL programming? 
 
A: Standards and Best Practices usually come from common sense. I want to point out that it is God given potential which one must realise and be conscious to utilize it for His glory. --LinkedIn.com

A data model of the SAP Bill of Material Explosion tables

• Will Pattern Discovery Systems Trump Analyst's Rules-Based Models?
• Why don’t RDBMS products support sub-typing?
• Which of these two data model fragments is normalised and to what extent?

Big Data, Little Happiness

The Death Of Expertise

Berlusconi's holocaust jibe provokes German outrage

CJD: The reality is that most practitioners are too set in their non-relational ways and we cannot expect them to understand and appreciate the relational model. Rather, we must focus on the young generation of practitioners, who learn the relational model at university.

MS: Chris, you don't understand. I am teaching those youths: they were not around when we struggled with the huge problems of the pre-relational systems and they are reinventing all of them!

Now that we have seen a lot of information about NoSQL databases, it is interesting to drop back and look around at how much NoSQL stuff we already have in our organizations. I had never thought of a file system as a database, but it is. The comparison is fascinating. File systems don’t impose any structure on the data that is stored in any given file. There is a key value relationship to each file. There is little control over concurrency beyond file locking. This is very similar to NoSQL, with locking only at the aggregate level. File systems are cheap; everyone has one and they hold huge amounts of data on multiple nodes. --Book review, NoCOUG Journal

Find GUID in Database

• Consistency...when do you truly need it?
• Is there any difference between Fortress Model and Data Model?
• Which is better practice Composite Key vs Surrogate Key?
• Big data 5nf-fifth normal form
• How to model ternary associative entity with a binary constraint?

• CREATE ASSERTION Impossible Dream (by Erwin Smout)
• Why ASSERTIONs Are Important (by Toon Koppelaars)

Joe Biden wants to nominate Obama for sainthood

Stanford opening new lab to study bad science

"The world is awash in data. Figuring out what to do with it is the problem. The press is littered with reports about Big Data. Many CIOs report that their CEOs have come to them and said, “We need some of that Big Data.” That often means make sure we’re collecting all the available data, often deploying a new Hadoop-based infrastructure to store and analyze it. After this elaborate process and extensive investment, they’ll start mining to figure out if there are critical insights that come out of the data. We see many entrepreneurs that start the same way. Aggregate data and look for a problem."

GE: Though I might come up with slightly different lists, in general, I agree with your expression of criteria for selecting a primary key and of generality and simplicity, but disagree with your conclusion that "RM scores better than any other modeling scheme."

Schemaless describes the storage engine, not the data. Data has schema. No Data is ever Schemaless. Schemaless DBs merely describe a feature of themselves, not the data they store. Namely that they don't store and enforce this schema in addition to the data.
One advantage of this Is that you can change the schema "easily" - helps with up time. Now if you don't evolve the old data with each schema change you can end up with multiple schemas stored in your backend and no way of knowing which data is of which schema without some form of analysis of the data. Show me the Front end that can deal with evolving schemas without knowing about them ;) Point being Schema's always there wether any tier deals with it explicitly or not. Something has to manage it. --LinkedIn.com

Big data means the reign of the relational database is over

What is the best way to explain Normalization 1NF,2NF and 3NF

Samsung’s entire leadership team is paid less than individual executives at Google, Apple

The Last NULL in the Coffin: A Relational 2VL Solution to Missing Data
March 15, 2014 11:15am
Microsoft Technology Center, 1065 La Avenida, Building One, Mountain View, CA, 94043

1: - a picture is only one representation of a data model: What is the adequate data structure to store a data model: Picture, Text (UML), formal (Gellish), Database) - is there an API to access, create and manipulate data models - do you handle hundreds of types (Entity, Relationship, Attribute): - do you handle one conceptual data model and derived consistent (external) submodels - document : which meta-attributes must be maintained to describe the elements of the data model. How to create different views of the data model (Pictures with different views, detailed printed documents)
2: - How to check the data model with instance data and queries based on the requirements.
3. - Use the ER-Model for Instance data (instead of the relational model) and thereby avoid the impedance mismatch:
4: A query language to access instance data which is based on the Entity-Relationship-Model and NOT on the relational model" --LinkedIn.com

mysql - additional information on normalization 

Do you use Composite Primary Keys to design a good, solid data model?

http://image-store.slidesharecdn.com/a606a81e-9bd4-11e3-8016-22000a9aa8cc-large.png

Zombie Studies Gain Ground on College Campuses

JL: You said: "... much of the underlying motivation of NoSQL stuff is anti-relational ..." Okay, so? Data management in graph/document/columnar dbs is not possible because they are "anti-relational"?

• What exactly does this have to do with whether graph/documents/columnar database systems "are possible or not"?
• Columnar DBMS's can be relational and are not considered NoSQL products.
• At issue is not the possibility of graph/document systems, but what they are appropriate for.

A view is a logical table based on one or more tables or another view.View can be thought as a virtual table which takes the output of a query and stores it ... A View can be based on a table or another view.--dwhlaureate.blogspot.in

Will physical modelling and normalization make sense in next decade?

Database design patterns

How Edward Snowden went from loyal NSA contractor to whistleblower

In mid-2006, Snowden landed a job in IT at the CIA. He was rapidly learning that his exceptional IT skills opened all kinds of interesting government doors. "First off, the degree thing is crap, at least domestically. If you 'really' have 10 years of solid, provable IT experience… you CAN get a very well-paying IT job," he wrote online in July 2006.

• Less than half of US Republicans now believe in evolution 
• One-third of Americans reject evolution

• Beware an Alliance of the Weak

Observe the trend of NoSQL growth, revenue will trail along irrespective. In the industry, only with respect to non-OLTP applications, RDBMS is in "keep the lights on" state by necessity, it is either awaiting obsolescence/end of life, or replacement with NoSQL solution; no longer a "workhorse" - this was the discussion point. --LnkedIn.com

Why semantic models like RDFOWL, TMDM, are not sufficient for the web of linked data

Why don’t RDBMS products support sub-typing?

Cisco unveils 'fog computing' to bridge clouds and the Internet of Thing

I do not understand your first point. Even a database designed with only 1NF can have integrity if other methods are used to ensure that integrity. [Higher n]ormal forms can guarantee the absence of various integrity issues, but the lack of a normal form does not guarantee the presence of the integrity issue. I remember writing pages of code to do just that in the early days of RDBMS products before normal forms (i.e., referential integrity) was strictly enforced by the DBMS. --LinkedIn.com

What is difference between storing data in traditional and modern way in database?

What is Surrogate Key, why it is used, is it Primary Key?

Point-of-sale malware infecting Target found hiding in plain sight

Poor Data Management Blinded Chase to Madoff Fraud

• Why It Makes Sense to Pay Beautiful CEOs More 
• What are the Best Looking Data Models 
• THE VISUAL ORGANIZATION