On 23/05/09 09:34, Scott Marlowe wrote: > I have a great deal of respect for Celko. I don't always agree with > everything he says, but most of it makes a lot of sense to me. I didn't intend any disrespect to Joe Celko. I have read a number of his articles, which tend to be well written and informative. Last year, when I posted to comp.databases asking for advice on whether to refactor that table, he wrote "You will have to throw it all out and start over with a relational design", "Throw away the idiot who did the EAV. This is not a good design -- in fact, it is not a design at all", and "This is basic stuff!!" Then he copied the same EAV example that was linked earlier by Rodrigo, claiming that "someone like me" had suggested it. With all the respect I have for Mr. Celko, that was hardly helpful, as that example and the situation I had described were quite different. It also did not encourage me to follow his advice and start from scratch (and fire my boss, who was the mentioned "idiot"). I understand the problems that can arise from bad design choices, and I know that Celko is vehemently opposed to anything that resembles EAV, but I felt that in our case "throwing it all away" would be excessive. We had safeguards to ensure referential integrity, and keeping the values in the same table allowed us to let users manage them all with the same form. So I guess it's like Stefan Keller said in a different thread today: "Know when to break the rules." - Conrad -- Sent via pgsql-general mailing list (pgsql-general@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-general
