I am working on entirely new papers (not re-writes) in the PRACTICAL DATABASE FOUNDATIONS series. I have already published two:
- THE FIRST NORMAL FORM - A DEFINITIVE GUIDE
- PRIMARY KEYS - A NEW UNDERSTANDING
available for ordering from the PAPERS, and two more:
- RELATIONAL DATABASE DOMAINS: A DEFINITIVE GUIDE
- DATABASE RELATIONS: A DEFINITIVE GUIDE
are in progress and forthcoming, respectively.
In the process, I am coming across industry common and entrenched "pearls" that I am using for my "Setting Matters Straight" (SMS) and "To Laugh or Cry" (TLC) posts on Linkedin. I do those posts to enable the few thinking database professionals left realize how scarce foundation knowledge is, and to illustrate fallacies that abound in the industry, of which they are unaware, and which the papers are intended to dispel.
Time permitting, I may expose and dispel some of those fallacies, treated in more depth in the papers, such that those thinking professionals can test their knowledge and decide whether the papers are a worthy educational investment.
Here's one.
“Data is stored in two-dimensional tables consisting of columns (fields) and rows (records). Multi-dimensional data is represented by a system of relationships among two-dimensional tables.”
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- The tabular presentation format should not be confused with relational database structure and the dimensionality thereof -- it plays no role in RDM.
- Database relations represent groups of entities that share a set of defining properties and are, thus, of the same type. Entities are represented by tuples, properties are represented by attributes in the database. Relations can be presented as tables on a physical medium: tuples appear as rows and attributes as columns, but the tabular arrangement on the medium plays no role in RDM.
- Attributes and tuples are logical, fields and records are physical.
- It is the medium and, thus, the presentation of the relation on it that are two-dimensional. A relation is a relationship of domains and has as many dimensions as its cardinality (i.e., the number of attributes), and therefore is multidimensional.
- At the logical level relationships between relations (not tables!) are also represented by (associative) relations that are, therefore, also multidimensional.
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