[ic] Normalized database for the Foundation demo.

[interchange-users@icdevgroup.org (* *)]

Hi,

>Its my experience that you would not normalise the customer information out
>of an order header anyway. If you were to do this, you would effectively be
>able to rewrite order history - which I would consider undesirable.

It's true that it should not be possible to modify order history.
But is order history the same thing as order lines.
In the example I depicted in my original mail, The shop would have tried to 
ship to Belarus instead of Belgium. I was just wondering if normalizing 
tables would have prevented this from happening if user data was corrected 
after the order was placed.

>Interchange was designed to be largely database independent - able for
>function with RDBMS down to even to flat files. Normalising the the nth
>degree would likely force another level of complexity for many people.
>
You're probably right. You know your user base better than I do.

>Additionally, foundation does not have a particularly complex or bloaty 
>data structure.

This might partly due to the fact that it is not normalized, but even 
normalizing it would keep it simple. We've all seen more complex data 
structure.

>Unless you are talking about tables with hundreds of thousands of
>records, would you see a gain in normalising?

I think, yeah. Even for tables with fewer records. Doesn'it make more sense 
to query a view (or joined tables) than to query an non-normalized table. 
Modifications to tables are 'naturally' made to views (or joined results). I 
think that's why DBMS became RDBMS decades ago. But maybe non-normalized do 
offer benefits (other than simplicity), I'm just too used to work with 
normalized tables.


Cheers,
Dominique.