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Is USB just a pollinating insect that comes from America?
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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USB kidding me
The less you need, the more you have.
Even a blind squirrel gets a nut...occasionally.
JaxCoder.com
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Honey, I hope you queen see how silly this question is.
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It's not often that one of these make me think, just usually chuckle, but this one did both. 
"When you are dead, you won't even know that you are dead. It's a pain only felt by others; same thing when you are stupid."
Ignorant - An individual without knowledge, but is willing to learn.
Stupid - An individual without knowledge and is incapable of learning.
Idiot - An individual without knowledge and allows social media to do the thinking for them.
modified 19-Nov-21 21:01pm.
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It's nice to wax nostalgic about these things, it gives me a swarm fuzzy feeling.
"the debugger doesn't tell me anything because this code compiles just fine" - random QA comment
"Facebook is where you tell lies to your friends. Twitter is where you tell the truth to strangers." - chriselst
"I don't drink any more... then again, I don't drink any less." - Mike Mullikins uncle
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Depends on your definition of "B". Could be a female canine, from America of course.
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OriginalGriff wrote: Is USB just a pollinating insect that comes from America?
That'd be weird since most of the bees in America are European bees. 
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This one is a nice compact flash of wisdom!!!
If you can't laugh at yourself - ask me and I will do it for you.
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Have to skip since would be to rude.
Yeah, I'm almost home again 
Bastard Programmer from Hell
"If you just follow the bacon Eddy, wherever it leads you, then you won't have to think about politics." -- Some Bell.
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There - I said it! 
For almost 40 years, (apart from the odd dalliance with MySQL, SQL Server & Oracle), I have worked with databases that impose no such restrictions. So maybe I'm biased.
Here's my argument for removing the database schema 'straight-jacket':
- ASAP Data Validation. It puts the sole responsibility for data validation exactly where it should be: with the developer. The best place to catch bad data, is at the point of entry - before it gets anywhere near a database. That applies to user input and data feeds. If you are going to validate early, (and properly), there's no need to have a rigid database schema.
- Flexibility. It provides flexibility at no cost. A traditional RDBMS has a fixed data model, (defined by the schema), and will need effort every time it needs changing - and, these days, that responsibility is quite probably with another team: DBA's. If nothing else, this will cost time.
- Disk space. Defining a column size to accommodate the maximum possible length is a huge waste of space in a large table - particularly when there are probably dozens of those columns. For instance: a simple postal address table will need, at least, 5 x CHAR(50) address fields, plus a post/zip code field. And how many addresses actually use all of that space? Zero!
P.S. I'm now going out until the flames die down! 
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OK, so you've stored your dates in your database as unlimited-length strings. With varying levels of "validation" on the front-end.
Now write a report based on a date range, given your table contains values such as "20190314", "1st May 2020", "32nd February 2990", "Third Sunday after Whitsun 21997", etc. 
And that's before you notice the significantly increased space it takes to store a string representation of a date over a proper date column.
Using proper data types in the database is precisely the kind of "straight-jacket" you want.
"These people looked deep within my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined."
- Homer
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Well I could validate at entry to ensure it's a consistent format - but, in practice, with the database I use, dates are stored as the number of days since 31/12/67. So, for dates since then, we are holding 1-5 digits - and for dates before that, there'll be a "-" in front.
If you tell the query language, (which includes an implementation of SQL), that the column is a date, it will figure out how to sort and select on that column. But that isn't enforcing any restrictions on how data is stored - it's just to help us use it when we need it - e.g. for a report.
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If you're telling the data definition language a column is a date, why do you care how it's stored?
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What you are bringing up is a foundational challenge of the Software Developer: where is the proper place for database-related logic. IE - How much does application do versus what the DBMS does?
ASAP Data Validation
You are codifying rules into your software that some else has to learn later on when/if a new application is built on top of the data.
If that is absolutely never going to happen (the data is only used by this one app) then you are correct, keep all the rules in the application.
But, what if later on the data in the database is going to be kept and a new App is being built, but now there are length constraints that you have to find all through the code? That could be very difficult when a dev down the road could just look at the length of the target field in the DB.
Flexibility
You said, "A traditional RDBMS has a fixed data model, (defined by the schema), and will need effort every time it needs changing"
But now this makes it sound like, "well, we'll create one big wide table with fields named Field1...Field200 and we'll just use it like a bucket. Make everything a huge varchar field."
But that can make the DB extremely slow also since fields will not be able to be indexed as easily.
Use Each Tool For It's Best Purpose
I like the balance of letting each tool do it's own work.
Here's what I mean by that:
1) allow the DB side handle lengths by implementing the built-in type system & field size constraints.
2) allow the software side (application) to do the programmatic types of things and much of data validation (insuring phone number is valid format).
3) Another good example is not using triggers. Triggers are like secrets that fire in the DB which later do some programmatic thing that can be very invisible to the developer. But this is programmatic type of code that should probably be in the app --- which helps you remember that the app is where data manipulation really occurs.
On your point, as a dev myself I can definitely see how you'd want as much _control_ of how the data is used in the application layer since we don't want to depend upon constraints that the DB Admin puts upon us. It just makes our lives more difficult & less flexible when we need to fix a thing that is happening in production.
There is no exact answer to this, of course, it is a ebb & flow type of thing & related to each shop and how they do it.
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raddevus wrote: You said, "A traditional RDBMS has a fixed data model, (defined by the schema), and will need effort every time it needs changing"
But now this makes it sound like, "well, we'll create one big wide table with fields named Field1...Field200 and we'll just use it like a bucket. Make everything a huge varchar field."
That reminded me of a team project I worked on back in 2000 when one of the developers thought he had the best idea for a database for our new project. His solution was one table with ID, Title, and Value. That's it. Everything and I mean everything would be put into that table. "Easy Peasy" right? What a nightmare that was. 
"When you are dead, you won't even know that you are dead. It's a pain only felt by others; same thing when you are stupid."
Ignorant - An individual without knowledge, but is willing to learn.
Stupid - An individual without knowledge and is incapable of learning.
Idiot - An individual without knowledge and allows social media to do the thinking for them.
modified 19-Nov-21 21:01pm.
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Donathan Hutchings wrote: Everything and I mean everything would be put into that table. "Easy Peasy" right? What a nightmare that was.
Yep, I've seen the same thing. It's one of those ideas that for like 10 seconds seems like the Greatest Idea Ever!!! Then, for the years afterward it is the most terrible thing ever.
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Yup. That idea was abandoned when he had to write the first search query. 
"When you are dead, you won't even know that you are dead. It's a pain only felt by others; same thing when you are stupid."
Ignorant - An individual without knowledge, but is willing to learn.
Stupid - An individual without knowledge and is incapable of learning.
Idiot - An individual without knowledge and allows social media to do the thinking for them.
modified 19-Nov-21 21:01pm.
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For completeness, this is called the Entity-attribute-value model and it has its place in the design tools drawer. To say that you should use it for everything is as silly as to say that you should use it for nothing.
Mircea
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I completely agree, but again, this was in 2000 when asp, vbscript, and Javascript was king. I use it all of the time as lookup lists.
"When you are dead, you won't even know that you are dead. It's a pain only felt by others; same thing when you are stupid."
Ignorant - An individual without knowledge, but is willing to learn.
Stupid - An individual without knowledge and is incapable of learning.
Idiot - An individual without knowledge and allows social media to do the thinking for them.
modified 19-Nov-21 21:01pm.
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raddevus wrote: well, we'll create one big wide table with fields named Field1...Field200 and we'll just use it like a bucket. Make everything a huge varchar field
I've once had to fix a table like this, what a nightmare it was
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Especially when you realized that the fields in the application didn't end up in the same columns, it depended on whether they had data or not. 
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Quote: Defining a column size to accommodate the maximum possible length is a huge waste of space in a large table - particularly when there are probably dozens of those columns. For instance: a simple postal address table will need, at least, 5 x CHAR(50) address fields, plus a post/zip code field. And how many addresses actually use all of that space? Zero!
This is the only piece I don't fully agree with, fixed column size help DB performances a lot. So if your architecture needs performances, you might want fixed data sizes. Especially if those data need to be sent to native code, as moving a single contiguous block of data is way easier and faster than serializing/deserializing.
GCS d--(d-) s-/++ a C++++ U+++ P- L+@ E-- W++ N+ o+ K- w+++ O? M-- V? PS+ PE- Y+ PGP t+ 5? X R+++ tv-- b+(+++) DI+++ D++ G e++ h--- r+++ y+++* Weapons extension: ma- k++ F+2 X
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den2k88 wrote: fixed column size >may< help DB performances a lot
Allowing the db to access a field in a record by position can enhance performance a lot.
But only if it doesn't kill it with memory requirements.
My rule of thumb is to always put varchars last in a record.
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