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Entry tags:
learning new patterns
Coming to the world of SQL databases from the world of object-oriented programming is...different. I'm starting to realize why some idioms are different, and I'm sure there are tons more that I haven't noticed yet and am probably getting wrong. But that's what learning experiences are for.
Consider, for example, a system where you have authors with associated publications. If I were designing a system to track that in, say, Java, I would define an Author class and a Publication class, with bidirectional links (Author would have a collection of Publications; Publication would have a collection of Authors (because sometimes authors collaborate)). But in a database table design you don't do that; you define a Persons table that has columns for some unique ID, name, and anything else about the person, and you have a Publications table that has columns for things about the publication like a (book) unique ID, title, publisher, genre, etc, and also the unique ID from the Persons table for the author -- and I'm not sure if multiple authors means multiple rows in the Publications table or if there's some way to do collections. But the point is that a Person doesn't know about its publications -- when you want that you'll do a JOIN between the two tables and then you'll have what you need. Connections between flavors of data are external to the data. This makes sense, but it's going to take a little getting used to.
(Y'all who are way ahead of me on this should please feel free to point out any errors in the above and save me mis-learning some things. Thanks.)
Consider, for example, a system where you have authors with associated publications. If I were designing a system to track that in, say, Java, I would define an Author class and a Publication class, with bidirectional links (Author would have a collection of Publications; Publication would have a collection of Authors (because sometimes authors collaborate)). But in a database table design you don't do that; you define a Persons table that has columns for some unique ID, name, and anything else about the person, and you have a Publications table that has columns for things about the publication like a (book) unique ID, title, publisher, genre, etc, and also the unique ID from the Persons table for the author -- and I'm not sure if multiple authors means multiple rows in the Publications table or if there's some way to do collections. But the point is that a Person doesn't know about its publications -- when you want that you'll do a JOIN between the two tables and then you'll have what you need. Connections between flavors of data are external to the data. This makes sense, but it's going to take a little getting used to.
(Y'all who are way ahead of me on this should please feel free to point out any errors in the above and save me mis-learning some things. Thanks.)
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I was sufficiently intrigued by the sheer diversity of terms for these things, that I held a poll on it. "Join table" was the clear winner, but "map", "link(|ing|y])", and "(x|cross|)ref(|erence])" all had multiple endorsements.
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