Re: Redeveloping the system - was Thoughts on payment handling in 1.4.x

[David Tangye <..hidden..>]

On Fri, 2007-04-27 at 19:47 -0700, Chris Travers wrote:
> Actually, I would slightly quibble with this point.  Rather than
> define terms precisely (since natural language is descriptive rather
> than prescriptive), it is a good idea to discuss what we mean by what
> we say and challenge eachother to find better words.  But we see the
> same need for clarity.
Sounds more like you are expanding on what I said, rather than
quibbling.
> If a field in the database is TOASTed, is it still a column?
I do not know what toasted means.
>   What is
> the difference between a field on a report and a column in a tabular
> report?
That's a totally different usage of column from column in a database. A
database column might be viewed or presented as a field in a report.
That field might be laid out in a column, ie its layout or format is
columnar.

> Actually to be most precise, there are neither fields nor columns in
> the database.  Only sets and members of sets.
No sorry, sets, members, tuples etc is the university way of
learning/speaking mathematically about the subject and relational
theory. When an RDBMS is implemented in the industry, eg by Oracle,
Sybase, MySql, IBM and all others I know, except lame Microsoft with
their MSAccess piece of garbage, they all speak of tables, columns and
rows.
> > If no development method (process plus artifacts) is agreed, how is
> > everybody going to work together?
> 
> Areas of expertise, precise communication, etc?  Development of
> appropriate processes?
Totally agreed. I look forward to seeing the processes and artifacts to
be produced from these being progressively defined in due course (sooner
rather than later :-) ).


Cheers
David