Hacker News Reader

Thank you!

> I'm seen some articles say that atomic in 1NF means you cannot have things that can be decomposed.

Yeah, this seems to be an vague argument, but it's not clear what it means. If I write "WHERE name LIKE 'A%'", does it mean that I "decompose" the string?

I don't see a difference between that and "where the column with array of languages contains string 'fr'".

View on HN

My goto example is phone numbers; typically you store the whole thing, but what if you want to do analysis on zones? You'd just extract the zone, not redesign your schema and rebuild the database.

You could argue that things like LIKE and SUBSTR etc are not really part of the relational model at all, but merely application code leaking into the SQL for convenience.

Therefore, you shouldn't expect / demand that the results are a formal relation.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com