The world rejoiced as josh@agliodbs.com (Josh Berkus) wrote:
> Chris,
>> Some time in the late '80s, probably '88 or '89, there was a paper
>> presented in Communications of the ACM that proposed using this sort
>> of "hypernormalized" schema as a way of having _really_ narrow schemas
>> that would be exceedingly expressive. They illustrated an example of
> <snip>
>> The entertaining claim was that they felt they could model the
>> complexities of the operations of any sort of company using not
>> more than 50 tables. It seemed somewhat interesting, at the time;
>> it truly resonated as Really Interesting when I saw SAP R/3, with
>> its bloat of 1500-odd tables.
>
> One can always take things too far. Trying to make everying 100%
> dynamic so that you can cram your whole database into 4 tables is
> going too far; so is the kind of bloat that produces systems like
> SAP, which is more based on legacy than design (I analyzed a large
> commercial billing system once and was startled to discover that 1/4
> of its 400 tables and almost half of the 40,000 collective columns
> were not used and present only for backward compatibility).
With R/3, the problem is that there are hundreds (now thousands) of
developers trying to coexist on the same code base, with the result
tables containing nearly-the-same fields are strewn all over.
It's _possible_ that the design I saw amounted to nothing more than a
clever hack for implementing LDAP atop a relational database, but they
seemed to have something slightly more to say than that.
--
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