The Null Device
Posts matching tags 'database'
2010/3/23
Gay marriage: the database engineering perspective, or how different definitions of the institution of marriage would be reflected in different (relational) database schemas. Not surprisingly, the strictly traditionalist schemas do hideously inelegant things like have different tables for men and women, or mark one gender as subordinate to the other (i.e., have the males table contain a wife_id column), while the most elegant ones reduce marriage to a type of edge in generalised social networking, leaving policy (can you marry yourself for tax reasons? can more than two people be married?) outside of the schema.
I wouldn't be surprised if, at some point, some technically ignorant legislator in some conservative backwater proposed a law requiring databases to have separate tables for men and women or something similarly brain-damaged.
2002/2/28
This is cool: Gadfly, a reasonably efficient SQL database module for Python, written entirely in Python (with optional C extensions) and using portable data files. I think Zope might make some use of it too. Mind you, I can't help but think that they could have made it more lightweight by getting rid of SQL text parsing and having a procedural interface for queries. (via gimbo)