Tom,

Firstly, great article. I actually stumbled onto it after reading your 2NF article via the link back here, and wanted to start from the beginning. Glad I did 😉

After reading, I was like "Wow... Good times..."

Then, after reading the comments, I was like "Aww... Bad Times..."

I will echo others in saying: Good job defending you stance. The scrutiny has been, at times, excessive (I thought), but I think you really made some great points both in your article and your replies. Honestly, coming from an App Dev background into this realm of DBAs, the article definitely helped put the concept of normal forms under a more focused lens for me (all theoretical nuance squabbling aside).

I also liked how you addressed the concept of context as it relates to "atomicity". So many data elements that we take for granted as being "simple" in nature rarely ever are (one nit that went unpicked: Full Name... atomic? yes/no/may-be-so), and are in fact themselves hierarchical arrays of data carried over from "real life" attempts at bringing a measure of order to The Chaos. I definitely think it was an important point to raise. I think using terms like "atomic" and "natural" in all this lingo tends to get us thinking to abstract and we forget that we're not actually talking about the indestructible, elemental entities of the cosmos. These data elements are, more often than not, just a bunch of non-sense concocted by a band of numb-skulls (and I do not exclude myself from being a subset of that domain) 😛

I think you touched on a great point, which really drives it home for me:

And as most users here probably have come to realize, being cogs in the corporate machine, this one principle definitely holds true in the business world: "The only constant is change". Ultimately, this is a good thing overall, I think. Humans are inherently less than perfect, and therefore our attempts to define and organize our world will be equally so. Our propensity for constant change gives us the ability to adapt to the unforeseen eventualities that will inevitably come due to our insufficient understanding of the world we seek to explain.

This means that anything we build must facilitate (or at least account for), and not restrict this element of change. A system that is too rigid will not hold up over time.

All this puts me in a mind to do what I love to do most in these situations (as some may have come to realize from my previous posts)... Over-simplify a vast and complex issue by distilling it down to a quaint movie reference! 😀

I call it "The Matrix Paradox" (I probably read it somewhere, so I'm sure I'm not the only one who calls it that... 😛 ) ...

Premise: Humans are imprecise, inaccurate, and to some degree unpredictable. For that reason, they are incapable of existing within a "perfect" system, because it would be too rigid, leaving no tolerance for error (which humans generate with great proficiency).

Dilemma:

- For the system to function properly it should be perfect

> (i.e. - in perfect adherence with "the rules". Note: Rules created by who? Exactly.)

- If the system is perfect it doesn't work

Summary:

As The Architect put it, "The problem ... is choice." Or to put it a different way (and I think more accurately): The problem is human error. Because in the world of 1 and 0, true and false, right and wrong... Choice is an illusion, and in the end you are either right or wrong. In adherence or in error.

Train of Thought... derailed! 😎