Re: My honours project - databases using dynamically attached entity-properties

On Tue, Mar 13, 2007 at 09:31:45AM +0000, Richard Huxton wrote:
> Sean Utt wrote:
> >And then what? Make the search box on www.postgresql.org able to
> >handle an email address as search text without throwing a shoe?
> >
> >Search for linus(at)torvalds(dot)com or any other 'email' address from the
> >postgres home page. Barfage every time. Easy for some isn't easy
> >for all, apparently. Left that out as a test case did we? Someone
> >searching a mailing list for an email address? Who wudda thunk it?
> >It works without the . -- don't know why, but then I also don't
> >know why someone hasn't tried that before me.
>
> Had a bad day?

Today was a good day ;)

> >Since we already have to do that, maybe someone could make that easier?
>
> Good idea!

Hear, hear!

> > Someone asked if something would be
> >useful, and the people who use the database to do real work said YES,
> >and here's how I might use it. Like full text seach and recursive
> >queries, user defined (fields|attributes|properties) and the ability to
> >manage them would be BUTTER! Is it a difficult problem? YES, but if it
> >wasn't, why should it be worth an advanced degree?
>
> I think the main discussion has been around:
> 1. Whether Edward's final-year project is basically EAV (in which case
> he'll probably need to work hard to get good marks).

As Josh mentioned, I'm on of the people who says EAV is never
justified. We do have a way of expressing wide ranges of constraints
not known in advance: it's called SQL, and people need to do some
design using it, however much they may fear that they've left
something out somehow. :)

> 2. Whether dynamically generating DDL is safe/practical in a
> business setting. This seems to split some *very* experienced people
> about 50:50. Half of them agree with me and the other half are
> inexplicably wrong ;-)

For the record, I'm in the "ag'in" column.

> * Another good example is the "questionnaire".

With all due respect, this is a solved problem *without EAV or
run-time DDL*. The URL below has one excellent approach to this.

<http://www.varlena.com/GeneralBits/110.php>

Cheers,
D
--
David Fetter <david(at)fetter(dot)org> http://fetter.org/
phone: +1 415 235 3778 AIM: dfetter666
Skype: davidfetter

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