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1. Quote of the Week

Hopefully with the emergence of better cloud infrastructure and unstructured databases, it'll become easier and easier to build utilities to handle the intake and transformation of big, messy datasets into units of info ready for insights. SocialScale (socialscale.io) just launched an MVP a month ago to provide instant access to raw social data (via Gnip), ready-for-analysis, in any tool. --LinkedIn.com

2. To Laugh or Cry?

Are SQL Relational DBMS's Here to Stay?

3. Online Debunkings

• Comments on Integrity constraints as approximations to business rules
• Comments on First Normal Form, Part 1 Atomicity

4. Interesting Elsewhere

• Lies, Damn Lies And The Myth Of Following The Data
• What Does Big Data Mean: A Cynic's Guide

5. And now for something completely different

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See series starting at

The First Normal Form in Theory and Practice Part I

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1. Quote of the Week

I'm not sure why you think integrity constraints are purely logical. Primary keys are physical constraints. They enforce that the primary key remains unique. Here's an example of SQL that creates a physical foreign key constraint.

ALTER TABLE FactInventoryCollections
 ADD CONSTRAINT
  FK_FactInventoryCollections_ClientPK,
  FOREIGN KEY (ClientPK)
   REFERENCES ViewCubeDimClient(ClientPK);

Physical constraints allow the database engine to return an error if an operation attempts to insert a row that violates any defined constraints. --LinkedIn.com

2. To Laugh or Cry?

When One Data Model Just Won't Do: Polyglot Persistence

3. Online Debunkings

• Comments: Atomicity and its reinterpretation
• Comments: Corporate Data Model re-defined as Enterprise Data Model (EDM)

4. Interesting Elsewhere

David McGoveran has been working on a book tentatively titled LOGIC FOR SERIOUS DATABASE FOLKS intended to set some matters straight regarding the formal, set-theoretic and logic foundations of the RDM which have been misinterpreted. While he is not ready to publish yet, I asked and he agreed to post at his site a draft of a chapter on view updating which I consider a must read (together with the Introduction), particularly since it exposes the thinking behind the Principle of Orthogonal Design rejected by Date and Darwen.

• Introduction
• Can All Relations Be Updated?

David invites comments.


5. New Links

Added the following to the LINKS page:

• The database curmudgeon speaks again
• Synthesizing 3NF Relations from FD's
• KnowOS

6. And now for something completely different

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See  

The First Normal Form in Theory and Practice Part I

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1. Quote of the Week

I have been in the data side of IT for quite some time now and have seen the evolution of how data is ingested, manipulated and regurgitated to the end users in hope of telling our consumers "how much of something did something". The main issue seems to be complexity of the data models and the fact we don't have a model that can expand with the data without adding tons of new schema. The solution.  --LinkedIn.com

2. To Laugh or Cry?

• i have a table with 4 FK's, help me with query to find the tables

3. Online Debunkings

• Comments on The Conceptual-Logical Conflation and the Logical-Physical Confusion
• Comments on 1NF Is Not Structural Regression

4. Interesting Elsewhere

• Knowledge-Based Trust Estimating the Trustworthiness of Web Sources
• Google wants to rank websites based on facts not links

5. And now for something completely different

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March blog post @All Analytics:

They should be represented in the database by integrity constraints -- not perfect substitutes, because they are very loose approximations to the rules -- but if they are enforced in the database by the DBMS they are usually recorded either in the definition statements that created the tables and constraints, or the database catalog.

Read it all

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See the series starting at

The First Normal Form in Theory and Practice Part I