sgeneris

It looks like somebody has censored this thread, deleting comments from it.

Oh, please, you can't be that gullible to believe Zuckerberg's marketing -- a guy who sued 300 people to build his Hawaii mansion.

With people like you no wonder he gets away with all his crap.

Destroying a society, addicting people/kids, violating privacy, generating inequality consequences -- interesting large scale problems indeed -- FB is working on CAUSING them. REALLY smart people wouldn't do this.

But then, who cares if you make big money. For allowing this the US deserves everything it gets.

Proper education no longer exists. It has been replaced by vocational training. And FANG dropping college education altogether suggests that even that will go away.

AI will obviate the need for human intellect altogether -- if machines and algorithms will do all the "thinking", why bother?

If you want to know how Trump got elected, why the US is in steep decline, ruled by corporate monopolies and oligarchs and on the verge of tyranny, look no further.

Facebook is only partially to blame. The real responsibility is of the society as a whole: the atomization and loneliness of the society which FB exploited; the public and government that permitted digital corporations to do more or less what they want, and the dismantling of all the protections that existed from concentration of power in monopolies and oligopolies.

It's really disturbing how people complain about what these companies are doing -- what did they expect would happen given the above?

Given that SQL DBMSs are so far from a true RDBMS, imagine where we would have been today if true RDBMSs rather than SQL ones had been implemented.

Education is developing people's intellect and reasoning ability, turning them into members of civilized society. It is not job training.

And the fact that the former has been replaced with the latter shows: the US is no longer a society, let alone a civilized one.

Well rounded education? No such thing anymore.

Experience is gained on the job, not during education.

You mean when there was still academia. There isn't anymore. It's been replaced with vocational training.

Education is NOT a piece of paper for job hunting. It is development of intellect. Most coders without education have none.

It's the conflation of education with job training that is pushing America down the drain and Trump is only one consequence of it.

The purpose of education is not to prepare for jobs, but to produce knowledgeable, reasoning, civilized, compassionate human beings capable of critical, independent thinking, which is what America most needs, not ignorant coders who can be manipulated to blindly program everything in sight, totally unaware of the inhuman, oppressive and exploitative implications.

Pointless to anybody incapable of getting the point, of which there are too many.

No, correctness is not pedantry, except for the ignorant. The database facts are axioms and the facts in query results are theorems -- logical inferences from the axioms. If you don't understand that you have no clue what a relational database is and what a RDBMS does. But hey, you're in the majority.

Any linking of number of columns to normalization is pure nonsense. The only accurate thing that can be said is that if you split a relation into multiple projections, by definition each will have less attributes than the original relation. But this is a triviality and it says nothing about the number of columns in the projected relations.

First, you got it backwards: denormalization joins relations, normalization splits them;

Second, if they share the same key, then it's not normalization, as the the split relations have distinct keys.

No. I just thought the clarification was important.

The basic issue is that derived data should not be included in base relations -- they belong in derived relations, such as views.

There NO relationships whatsoever between normalization and the number of attributes, which are determined by the number of properties that entities have in the real world i.e., the conceptual model.

What does it have to do with normalization?

What do you know about the hurts of denormalization? Can you even specify what they are?

No, I think you missed its point.

I dare you to demonstrate that the "big data solutions" guarantee logical and semantic correctness the way true RDBMSs do. Without that, garbage in garbage out. But because those "solutions" are so complex that nobody understand them, including those who designed them, their results are BELIEVED to be correct, which is not the same thing as being correct.

They are a fantasy only because users do not grasp the advantages of the RDM and confuse them with SQL, thus robbing vendors from any incentive to produce true RDBMSs.

If users are so accepting of denormalization as a solution to performance and are unaware of all its costs, why should vendors bother to come up with true RDBMSs that obviate the need to denormalize?

As long as users do not understand the RDM and its benefits true RDBMSs will remain a fantasy. Ignorance has never been conducive to progress.

One more thing: As these comments demonstrate, there is almost exclusive focus on performance, but nobody considers the drawbacks (cost) of denormalization. Practitioners are oblivious to them.

Normalization is not the same as full normalization.

Full normalization does not decompose into relations with same key, because that means splitting one type of entities in two, that makes no logical sense. Rather, it splits non-5NF relations that represent facts of multiple types into 5NF relations that represent facts of a single type and they have different keys.

Tables are not relations. Relations have attributes, not columns, that represent entity properties.

A R-table is a visual shorthand for a relation -- a way to visualize it on some physical medium (paper, screen) and the two should not be confused.

SQL DBMS are not relational, so they don't really implement relations (they support bags and NULLs), not all their operations preserve closure, have weak support of relational constraints, of physical and logical independence, I could go on and on.

Problem is practitioners confuse RDBMSs with SQL DBMSs and are incapable of seeing what they're missing in terms of practical benefits of the latter.

The sheer fact that much of the comments are about physical storage is an excellent validation of the article's claim that data professionals don't know and understand data fundamentals and the RDM.

Yes, I would be surprised.

Because, unlike most products which only require training to work with, true RDBMSs require knowledge of data and relational fundamentals and such is scarce today, because education has been replaced by sheer training.

How many database "experts" do you know today who have any background in logic and math, particularly those designing DBMSs?

I've watched them for almost 50 years and they've become worse and worse, not better.

What does this have to do with the article?

The argument in the paper is that data professionals -- 9ncluding yourself -- do not understand data fundamentals, for which reason they blame "poor performance" on the RDM. But RDM and normalization are purely LOGICAL and as the article states, performance is determined exclusively by PHYSICAL implementation. So the article does imply that on rare occasion you may be forced to denormalize WITH EXISTING SQL IMPLEMENTATIONS, but this has nothing to do with the RDM and normalization and everything to do with SQL implementations which are not relational, do not have proper support of physical independence and are not versatile enough at the physical level.