Valentina Model -- abstraction Properties.

[Ruslan Zasukhin]

On 12/13/05 3:48 PM, "jda" <jda at his.com> wrote:

> I was hoping a UNION or OUTER JOIN would give me the following if I
> have two records, one with author and title and one without:
> 
> id, uniqueID, hit, type, author, 1, title, 2
> id, uniqueID, hit, type
> 
> OR
> 
> id, uniqueID, hit, type, author, 1, title, 2
> id, uniqueID, hit, type, '', 0, '', 0

You could get this if second table have fields:

        authors, title, ... 26th field

But we have made that second table have only ONE field with value.
And instead 1 .. 28 linked records.

-----
Design with this second table is very unusual.
It is smart, but it is hard.

Hard also because SQL have no good solutions for such tasks.
But you have API way, so you can code anything you image.

-----
Problem here is that YOUR task has next Nature:

    I have object Book { id, hits, .. }
    
    and I have some special COLLECTION of properties.
        each property can have own label and value.
        number of properties for each book can differ.
    
    in your task you have set limit 16 properties.
    in general task -- no limit.

RELATIONAL MODEL can do this task only in way I show you.
But it is hard for it. No good SQL to support this.

In future (I hope near 2-5 months) we will try add into Valentina mechanism
to support such task. This will look simply as:

        Book { id, hits, properties(string, string) }

So VIRTUALLY you will work with SINGLE table.

This is DREAM. The most hard part will be invent nice and clear SQL for such
feature. Okay, that is other story...

-- 
Best regards,

Ruslan Zasukhin
VP Engineering and New Technology
Paradigma Software, Inc

Valentina - Joining Worlds of Information
http://www.paradigmasoft.com

[I feel the need: the need for speed]