Re: RDBMS design issue

Very complicated for sure. But what is the *purpose* of this database to be? This will lead to what needs to be tracked and how precisely. And to what can be elided.

Joe

Although true, this is not an answer to my question.

The Swedish have a useful system: Mor is Mother and Far is Father. MorMor is your maternal grandmother and MorFar is your paternal grandmother, and so on, to any depth. I don't offhand know of extensions beyond Mor and Far, but they may exist. This pattern occurs in all Norse languages.

There is a childrens' song playing on this. I encountered it when in Stockholm in the 1970s, when the children in a nearby park were singing it in chorus with gusto.

Again, all determined by intent, not technology.

By date.

The bottom line is Focus!

Joe

Not being Swedish, I don't know. I'd guess that it follows blood lines only because originally when XXX had a son YYY, the son's name was YYY XXXsson, and so on. For a daughter YYY could be XXXtochter, and so on. Being an evolved pattern, it will be very flexible and loose on the details.

But be no better?

Lots of people do just that. It works so long as their memory holds up.

I had a co-worker whose office was stuffed with teetering piles of paper articles and reports. Looked hopeless, but if you asked for something, he would go to one pile, and pull the requested item from somewhere deep in the pile. Never searched, never missed.

Depends on purpose. Phone books in Iceland are organized by first name, profession, last name, because there are too few unique last names to be useful.

To be precise, it's the old filing system used by secretaries back in the day of file cabinets. For each major entity dealt with there was a section, within which it was by accession date. If the entity got too big, subsections would be created, and so on. There was always an uncatorgized section in date order.

Libraries used a similar system, where reports et al were assigned a number in accession order, and the card file was populated by subject, author, and field cards.

How best to organize information was worked out long before computers were invented, and many systems evolved, each for a specific purpose and field. Modern computers actually have little to add to that except speed and capacity.

Which has not yet happened. What exactly are you trying to accomplish? Don't tell me how - too early in the discussion.

Joe

Oh?

Heh. I've given up.

Joe

I think we've exhausted this SED thread, so I'll stop.

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But I did recall a key to the larger issue. There are lots of ways to organize library indexes. The Savant of such things, Shiyali Ramamrith Ranganathan, worked out the details in the 1930s, in India, publishing in English. He spent his entire career on this issue.

.

Joe

You are not the first to think of such things, by orders of magnitude.

Another place to look are the various Secretary's "Handbook to Filing Systems". Google will bring up lots of examples.

I was deep into such issues back in the days when DEC VAX/VMS was being invented. DEC eventually published a book on VAX/VMS Internals and Data Structures:

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It cited two books that were very influential. The most important is: "Simon_Herbert_A_The_Sciences_of_the_Artificial_3rd_ed" - The Architecture of Complexity. MIT Press, still in print.

The other, regarding file system organization,was Ranganathan.

I don't recall where I got the Secretary's Handbook. It may have been my Department Secretary of that day; these no longer exist.

Dig in if you wish. Computers have changed nothing essential.

Joe