I have a very wide table (over 1000 attributes). I can group the
attributes into several, ~20, disjoint sets where the elements of each
set occur together. Call these sets of attributes G1, G2, ..., Gn. One
set, say G1 defines the existence of the row, with a1, a member of G1 as

I wonder if
WITH RECURSIVE MaryAncestor(anc,desc) AS
        ( (SELECT parent as anc, child as desc FROM ParentOf WHERE desc =
"Mary")

B.B. has referred to a red blue car example as a counter-example to some
things I've written.  Does anyone know what the example is and to what it is
an counter-example?  Thanks.  --dawn

I have the following relations (expressed as functional dependencies) which
I consider to be in BCNF (please correct me if I'm wrong):
Patient Identifier -> Patient Name, Ward
Date

This letter (monograph?) is in reply to Dawn Wolthius, who received what
she seems to have considered a short and unhelpful series of responses
from Fabian Pascal between October 9 and November 12, 2002. This was
also motivated by postings on the comp.databases.theory newsgroup,

I am constructing a stored procedure to run based on user input. What
I WANT to do is basically this:
SELECT *
FROM   tableA A

http://arxiv.org/abs/cs.DB/0402051
Somehow I forgot to include one more important section: converting interval
into materialized path. Here we go:
Take right boundary of the interval (4688/1521,4913/1594] and start applying

I am currently struggling with the use of the DatePart() function,
for instance if I have a check in and check out date in my hotel
datebase, how can I find all bookings I have for may,
A pointer to an online tutorial would be appreciated,

Does anyone know how to get this paper?
Nijssen, G.M., Duke, D.J., Twine, S.M., "The Entity-Relationship Data
Model Considered Harmful", Proc 6th Symposium on Empirical Foundations
of Information and Software Sciences, Atlanta, Georgia, USA, October

What I am trying to do is, map an inheritance hierarchy in a relational
database system.
Example:
Let's say you want to describe in a relational database, a collection of

What's the best approach to the scenario below.
There are multiple parent tables (let's say 5) that require a
relatiionship to a single set of attributes (1 to many).  From a
database maintenance point of view, the preference is to have a single

This problem comes up on newsgroup about once a year.  Given a
VARCHAR(n) column with words in it, how do you squeeze out the extra
spaces, that each word is separated by only one space?
You can nest function calls up to 32 levels deep in SQL Server and

Just a random thought over the weekend ...
Is there any join operation that could possibly return an infinite
result set in set theory?
Is this operation definable in SQL?

I am working on a database design for a many-to-many relationship
between two tables (using a third table as an intermediate table to
hold keys).  And I'm trying to use foreign keys with cascading
deletion to fulfill the following business rules.  This is a simple

Let's say that I have a relation with
the attributes A,B,C,D,E.
Is there a standard way to find the
candidate keys of that relation if I