Recently there has been some excitement created amongst database
enthusiasts (though not researchers) by the patented technology called
the TransRelational(TM) Model.  It was brought to the attention of the
general public by C.J. Date who gave a brief description of it in the

After waking up at 04:30 and not being able to go to sleep again, a
thought crossed my mind, regarding a table of inventory items. You
have a table like this:
CREATE TABLE items

I have the tables tblEmployees and tblProjects.
tblProjects has one column called Percentagetime, to hold the percentage of
time by an employee for a project.
My Question : Why should we introduce a 3rd table called

According to one reference, the union compatibility is defined as
such:
(1)the two relations have the same degree n (number of attributes) ,
and (2)  domain (Ai)= domain (Bi) for 1=<i<=n, where domain stands for

Continuing the debate on unique keys.  Can anything at all be converted to a
unique key?  What about this one:
CREATE TABLE reservations (
 hotel_room char(4),

In another thread, Bob Badour said: "Relation-valued attributes already
allow us to represent optional data as a constrained set where we can
enforce a maximum cardinality of 1 by specifying a nullary key."
I'm intrigued by this quote, but I just don't get it. Have looked

We hear the term "Denormalizing for performance" very often, and depending
upon who is doing it, there might be an exasperated  "et tu brute?" along
with it.
The informal slogan that serves as a nominal rationalization for

I'm not an ABSOLUTE newbie, but probably a relative newbie compared to many
in this group.  I've been programming in Access using VBA with DAO.  Ever
since I began, I thought it would ALWAYS been better to enforce referential
integrity with cascading deletes and cascading updates to ...

I just want to go on record as saying that I find the
whole pedantic insistence on differentiating between
a database and a dbms tiresome and counterproductive.
It isn't "precise"; it's ostentatious. Humans are

Can anyone tell me how to select the "most recent" date values from a
grouped query?  Consider the following:
CREATE TABLE [dbo].[TestQuery] ( [ID] [int] NOT NULL , [ID_Parent] [int] NOT
NULL , [Date] [datetime] NOT NULL ) ON [PRIMARY]

Every app wants to be a database app when it grows up.

I haven't seen the glossary posted for a while and with the talk about the
terms "database" and "DBMS" perhaps it would be helpful to send that out at
least monthly.  I've missed mAsterdam lately too -- is he the keeper of the
glossary?

It seems that automation is very important if you want to get anywhere close
to domain key normal form.
On the dbdebunk site Chris Date fielded a question on domain key normal
form, at this link:

There has been some serious concerns regarding the validity of the
performance analysis of the TransRelational Model (TRM from now on).
In this post I would like to add some clarification to that analysis
and also address some of the criticisms.

There's a feature I would like to see in today's RDBMSes.  It's the ability
to declare a constraint to be true,  but to tell the DBMS not to bother
enforcing it.  I'm talking here about SQLRDBMSes, and probably TRDBMSes as
well.