January 2008
Intermediate to advanced
384 pages
8h 1m
English
Content preview from Joe Celko's Thinking in Sets: Auxiliary, Temporal, and Virtual Tables in SQLBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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1.3. Tables as Entities
An entity is a physical or conceptual “thing” that has meaning in itself. A person, a sale, or a product would be an example. In a relational database, an entity is defined by its attributes, which are shown as values in columns in rows in a table.
To remind users that tables are sets of entities, I like to use collective or plural nouns that describe the function of the entities within the system for the names of tables. Thus “Employee” is a bad name because it is singular; “Employees” is a better name because it is plural; “Personnel” is best because it is collective noun and does not summon up a mental picture of individual persons, but of an abstraction (see SQL Programming Style, ISBN: 0-12088-797-5, for more details). ...
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