
Implications of Atomicity—More Columns
There are implications when business rules are atomic, particularly for rules that are
calculations or derivations. Leaving aside the special case of columns populated by
reference data code values, atomicity implies the following principle for calculated or
derived columns in a database:
A calculated or derived column can only be populated by one business rule.
At first glance this seems perfectly reasonable, and one might assume that even
when programmers build systems with traditional hand-crafted techniques they
would follow it. After all, we have all heard for many years, if not decades, about
practices and ...