What is Digg?142 Comments
- Berkana, on 05/31/2008, -3/+95Ah, the sweet, sweet taste of tech news on Digg again.
I'd like to see the impact Digg has had on Slashdot's traffic; I suspect it stole traffic from Slashdot for a while, until politics and random crap sent the nerds back to Slashdot as their tech teat. - LongShlong, on 05/31/2008, -2/+80Digg really needs more tech articles like this...
- JoshuaLowe, on 05/31/2008, -8/+66Barack Obama supports Database Normalization while John McCain opposes it. Your choice is clear.
- Paul, on 05/31/2008, -1/+54How the heck did useful tech content make it to the front page of digg... wow this is so 2005!
- thredden, on 05/31/2008, -0/+37actually digg used to have alot more of this type of stuff...
- ConAmoreEFuoco, on 05/31/2008, -3/+36Wow, I didn't know that diggers were so into database normalization!
- quetzzz, on 05/31/2008, -0/+31I once had a client ask me to normalize a database that already was. When I asked her what she was really asking for, she said, "You know, so normal people can read it." She wasn't very techo-savy.
- spammishking, on 05/30/2008, -2/+30I could've used this 2 semesters ago when I was taking database class and my professor insisted that we learn by Googleing everything
- TritonX, on 05/31/2008, -1/+29lol, what's the point of going to school then ?
- bxblox, on 05/31/2008, -5/+26I'm not saying its not useful but this is pretty much just a page from chapter one of a database 101 textbook.
- jemka, on 05/31/2008, -0/+14http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=everything&bt ...
- mmccarthy, on 05/31/2008, -2/+15I guess we've all had bad professors in college. Wouldn't it be great if someone sued a bad professor for their lack of achievement :) Realistically though, good programmers always find some way to learn.
- NeoPa, on 05/30/2008, -3/+16I've been referring people to this for months.
A great, easily digestible, piece on Database Normalisation :) - marx2k, on 05/31/2008, -0/+12I was going to post a dual input joke here but then I redecided
- jayhawk88, on 05/31/2008, -2/+11Yeah, what the hell is this egg-head crap doing on the front page? More lolcats and Britney making out with the space alien in the window dammit!
- nwelsh, on 05/31/2008, -0/+8The initial developers are usually the prototype team that hacked the system together. It's hard to be perfect at the first go, though i've worked with some teams that have got system design down to an art from.
- MuskokasFinest, on 05/31/2008, -0/+8Please no politics (or joke politics) in these articles...it destroys the nostalgic feel of real front page tech stories.
- mouthwash, on 05/31/2008, -0/+8Learned about making databases and normalizing many-to-many relationships in my CIS class this passed semester. I find it interesting an article this technical would ever make it to the frontpage. Dugg for a frontpage story actually relating to my schoolwork!
- DestroyFascism, on 05/31/2008, -0/+8True but paying a slob to babysit while you self teach is pathetic.
- nwelsh, on 05/31/2008, -0/+8Going down in lame geek jokes book to use in awkward non-technical crowd dinner conversation(you know when you want people to think what is he smoking . . . ).
- nwelsh, on 05/31/2008, -0/+7it's not really news, but it's a great article on normalization. It would be cool to learn how digg structured their database.
- andyduncan, on 05/31/2008, -1/+8If you were taught normalization on one slide at your university, then you don't understand it as well as you think you do, and I would never hire you to work on my databases. Even the linked article (which is far longer than one slide) is a summary, not an in-depth discussion of normalization such as I would expect to be presented in a University level class.
- Tableboy, on 05/31/2008, -1/+8Always Good To Get A Refresher Course :)
- azbmr, on 05/31/2008, -0/+7+ is 'or', so you are right that 0 + 1 = 1
Just FYI:
Yes and No = 1 & 0 = 0 - OutrightLie, on 05/31/2008, -0/+6No, you tool. Good, informative articles on items in the tech industry that could be used to further our knowledge and help in what we do.
Now Digg is polluted with "Hey look what Rob and Bigg did on MTV last night" and old 4chan references.
*sigh* I miss you Digg. - tolgafiratoglu, on 05/31/2008, -0/+6Well, wish I was working with perfectly normalized systems in all of my works, but no: Mostly (I don't know why) the very initial developers of systems don't care (or don't know?) normalization. So as second or third developer of a system you get mad and get mad, especially if you plan to use professional methods like using an ORM layer or turn the system into a multi-server environment.
I don't know why, the first developers of many running systems are idiots. Not only on DB, also on coding, they create stupid garbage procedural code, mostly with copy-pastes. What a nightmare to try to change things, which can be changed in seconds with OOP. - davidsetagaya, on 05/31/2008, -0/+6Be careful Digg, you're encroaching on Slashdot's territory here. Next thing you know they'll be posting articles like "Top 10 best Simpson's episodes ever" for revenge.
- keiran4u4eva, on 05/31/2008, -2/+8Useful info on Digg shocker!!
Normalisation is something that I could never quite be bothered to actually get my head around, so I just used to do it my own way. This has certainly done more for me in a few minutes, than a lecturer did over a few weeks! - mmccarthy, on 05/31/2008, -3/+8Yes and no! A lot of the text books struggle to explain these concepts in clear terms. I've not only witnessed but had to fix the design flaws in many databases over the years. I wish all database designers understood these concepts properly and applied them but a lot don't. This article is merely an effort to put the concepts in plain English (which a lot of the books struggle to do). Take a poll sometime to try to find out how many database designers fully understand the concepts of normalization.
- Angostura, on 05/31/2008, -0/+5If you like this kind of thing, I would like to recommend this:
http://www.tomjewett.com/dbdesign/dbdesign.php?pag ...
The basics of database design, nicely explained. - mmccarthy, on 05/31/2008, -5/+10I'm a woman, of course I can have it both ways :D
- mmccarthy, on 05/31/2008, -0/+5In my experience, many so called database developers know their language syntax but don't always fully understand normalization. Guess employers are more interested in testing for language skills.
- tolgafiratoglu, on 05/31/2008, -0/+5One of my friends were trying to handle a DB created several years before
The table included 400+ fields and 1 GB in size. All the things related to the community was in that table. I mean :
users
id, name, company......groups.....groupcontent....wall....messages
believe me....
Well he was trying to handle and reconstruct this table into several different tables but gave up later. - chepenguin, on 05/31/2008, -2/+6i just did a uni exam on this on friday :| why couldnt you of dugg this before then!! :(
- talonstriker, on 05/31/2008, -0/+4Most people already have learned this stuff.
and FYI, comp. programming and comp. sci. are two different things. If a person is a programmer, it doesn't mean that he knows comp. sci. and vice versa (I had a CS professor who hadn't written a program since he was in college). - DangerCollie, on 05/31/2008, -0/+4So nice to find resources like this. I wish I had a nickel for every crap database I looked at with one giant table full of NVARCHAR(255) because someone imported from Access with defaults. Then they're in a panic because it stopped working and they can't figure out why.
- adidos, on 05/31/2008, -0/+4The article fails to mention that quite often companies *DENORMALIZE* their databases to improve performance...Performance degrades rather quickly when DB's are in 4th or 5th NF due to all the required joins.
- azbmr, on 05/31/2008, -0/+4WTF? Binary logic (gates) are what I'm talking about here.
Here are your operands: True, False
Here are your operators: And, Or, Not, Xor, (, )
There are many symbols that can stand in for these things depending on the context. - nwelsh, on 05/31/2008, -0/+4400 fields? God that's nuts.
- Angostura, on 05/31/2008, -0/+4But even when prototyping normalisation should really be second nature. One you've "got it" it is actually quite difficult to create something unnormalised.
... if course, sometimes you denormalise for performance, - azbmr, on 05/31/2008, -0/+4You should realize that in some companies the programmers don't design the DBs.
- mijelh, on 05/31/2008, -0/+4Most likely through people pushing the "digg it" button
- shamess, on 06/01/2008, -0/+3You can hide that Apple and Obama content, you know.
- jayhawk88, on 05/31/2008, -0/+3Yeah but it made queries really easy. Inner Joins are hard you know.
- dwhitbeck, on 05/31/2008, -0/+3I worked for a company that bought manufacturing software based upon an Oracle database. They would do things like deciding they needed another field and instead of adding a field to the table they would put 2 or 3 items in one field separated by dashes. Also practically every field in every table was character valued so that, for instance, you could enter a O instead of a zero for what was supposed to be a numerical value. I tried to talk to the database administrators about normalization and received blank stares.
- MaxMWood, on 05/31/2008, -0/+3This is AS-Level ICT for anyone living in the UK who cares. I just did this course actually.
- rastakid, on 05/31/2008, -1/+4Hihi, silly you.
- azbmr, on 05/31/2008, -0/+3I just remembered that you CAN have it both ways: qubit. A quantum bit is both 1 and 0 at the same time.
- Archon810, on 05/31/2008, -1/+4So what you're saying is that you failed at your Professor's task since you didn't find this on google back then?
- mijelh, on 05/31/2008, -1/+4As an slashdotter, I agree with you.
I must add, however, that after digg became crap, I tried to return to slashdot only to find that they're getting worse every day too, with a growing anti-windows obsession wich makes every discussion turn into a microsoft vs foos *****, much like digg turns everything into an obama vs hillary troll war -
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