Sunday, February 12, 2017

This Week



1. What's wrong with this picture

"If a collection of values is atomic, store them together. Meaning, if you always care about the entire group, if you never search for nested values and never sort by nested values, then they should be stored together as a single field value. If not, they should be stored in a separate table, each value bring a row, each assigned the parent ID (foreign key) of a record on the other table that "owns" them as a group. For more info, search on the term "database normalization".

Some databases, support an array as a data type. For example, Postgres allows you to define a column as a one-dimension array, or even a two dimension array. If your database does not support array as a type of column definition, transform you data collection into an XML or JSON support if your database your database supports that type. For example, Postgres has basic support for storing, retrieving, and non-indexed searching of XML using XPath. And Postgres offers excellent industry-leading support for JSON as a data type including indexed support on nested values. Going this XML/JSON route can be an exception to the normalization rules I mentioned above." --Response to the Quote of the Week listed next, StackOverflow.com

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2. Quote of the Week

"I'm currently trying to design a database and I'm not too sure about the best way to approach a dynamically sized array field of one of my objects. My first thought is to use a column in my object to store an array of integers. However the more I read, the more I think this isn't the best option. Concrete example wise, I have a player object that stores 0 to many items, which are represented by an integer. What is the best way to represent this?" --StackOverflow.com

3. To Laugh or Cry?

2017 Trends in Data Modeling

4. Of Interest

5. Now available

THE DBDEBUNK GUIDE TO MISCONCEPTIONS OF DATA FUNDAMENTALS available to order here.
Reviews

And now for something completely different


Now @The PostWest

Unbounded Greed and Hypocrisy - Corporate Zillionaires Pretend What They Congenitally Lack--Immigrant Compassion--To Profit from Exploiting Both Them and American Workers.

My Take: Being "better than Obama" on Israel does not require much. But there was never a reason to put much trust in any election promise by Trump, or by anybody else, for that matter. Even if a politician is not an anti-semite--and that's very rare these days--he is surrounded by a uniformly anti-semitic world and advisors and under huge anti-semitic pressures. "Art of the Deal" Trump is not one to resist them. Jews have always been the only soft target, so fuck'em.

Anti-semitism? Nah, just "criticism of Israel's policies".


The Palestinians: Nice people, let's give them a state!

Book of the Week (Order via this link to support this site)

Glick, C., THE ISRAELI SOLUTION: A ONE-STATE PLAN FOR PEACE IN THE MIDDLE EAST

Article of the Week

As Trump era begins, what does Israel actually want in the West Bank

Video of the Week

Engineering Evil: Inside The Holocaust

Site of the Week

Palestinian Media Watch

Note: I will not publish or respond to anonymous comments. If you want to say something, stand behind it. Otherwise don't bother, it'll be ignored.
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1 comment:

  1. BenMarch 10, 2017 at 10:12 AM

    'The projected expansion of the data ecosystem in 2017 is causing extremely deliberate, systematic challenges for organizations attempting to exploit the most effective techniques available for maximizing data utility.'

    It seems like the pyramid technique in writing has been replaced by what we can call the fractional column technique, wherein the most pure, distilled bullshit rises to the top, and a sticky mess of crud is left at the bottom.

    “As modern data diversity and volumes grow, relational database management systems (RDBMS) are proving too inflexible, expensive and time-consuming for enterprises,” Cambridge Semantics VP of Engineering Barry Zane said.

    I'm honestly impressed at the chutzpah of the NoSQL and related movements. They've basically been able to sell customers what amounts to an elaborate distributed hashtable and claim it's a DBMS.

    And they've accomplished this by claiming that all the features that a proper DBMS provides are "inflexible."

    Why have an optimizer when you can pay your engineers to write queries by hand and roll their own transactions, and then buy twice the hardware because it's all hopelessly inefficient?

    Or the nonsense about being "schemaless." I got into this with a boss a while back, and I pulled up a function in our application, and pointed to the signature.

    "So, if this isn't an integer, this function can't run. And if this record isn't present, it can't run. And if this field is missing, it can't run."

    "That's your structure, and it's going to be enforced one way or another. All your 'schemaless' product does is distribute it in a thousand places all over the code base."

    ReplyDelete

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