Re: A rant about the terminology debate

On 08/24/2012 12:09 PM, Sandro Hawke wrote:
> On 08/24/2012 07:32 AM, Kingsley Idehen wrote:

>> [...]

>> Sandro,
>>
>> How would you map g-box, g-snap, and g-text in formal relational DBMS 
>> terminology? Such a mapping would help many. Basically, mapping to 
>> relations, sets of tuples, and notation.
>>
>
> I'm not really fluent in RDBMS theory terminology.   I do know the 
> terminology database app developers use, though, I think -- the kind of 
> stuff you find in the Oracle or MySQL manuals (talking about "tables" 
> instead of "relations").   In that terminology, I'd say:
>
>   g-box: table (or view)
>   g-snap: dump of a table (or view)
>   g-snap: not something one normally deals with; either:
>       - a state of a table; or
>       - a value which is the set of all the rows in a table.
>
> This is more of an analogy than a real correspondence, since a table row is 
> not the same thing as an RDF triple, in general. (You could make a 
> Subject/Property/Value table, but the data typing of the value wouldn't work 
> right, in general.)
>
>     -- Sandro

I don't see how a g-box can be a table, as a table is only a potentially small 
part of a database.

I think that perhaps the mapping to informal usage is:

g-box: database
g-snap: database
g-text: not used much as databases aren't often moved around, perhaps database 
dump, but that's not really very correct

peter

Received on Friday, 24 August 2012 17:46:36 UTC