Re: [Bulk] Re: Layout of "Itinerary" Record - A Database Design Question

Hi, Nathan:

I suggest you think of the problem this way:

* design an ideal "object oriented" data structure with objects in
memory to represent the desired data, e.g. the "legs" of a trip, etc.
* design procedures or functions (or "methods") needed to navigate
those data structures to obtain any desired information
o ideally, the data structures are designed in such a way as to
facilitate the programming of these methods
* now, it is just a matter of designing a way to store these data
structures in a "persistent" manner as a set of rows in some
tables, and to also design some routines to load and store the data
to and from the "in memory" version to the "on disk" persistent
representation
o if the above data structures are well-designed and well thought
out, it should be straight forward to create a "mapping" to and
from the "persistent" representation

Does that make sense?

HTH,

Mark S. Waterbury

> On 6/7/2016 6:12 PM, Nathan Andelin wrote:

As a driver/navigator, I'd be more interested in the legs (graph
edges, option 2). As a tourist riding a bus, I'd (probably) be more
interested in the stops (vertices, option 1).

That's essentially the problem. Different people have different points of
view in regards to how they'd like to view the data. Database
administrators warn against basing record layouts how data is "viewed";
they rather favor normalization rules. However, in this case, both layouts
seem fairly well normalized.