Comments on: Answers to Episode 4 (”What’s ‘normal’, really?”)

By: lepezdok

lepezdok — Fri, 22 Dec 2006 22:42:28 +0000

As for the brevity of answers — I would actually prefer to read a somewhat more extended version for each of those examples. It’s like in a lecture if a prof asks a difficult question, and nobody answers, he should probably spend some time explaining. Otherwise, what is the point?

By: xhtmlcoder

xhtmlcoder — Fri, 22 Dec 2006 12:06:42 +0000

It is good to learn Normalisation and the “Entity-relationship model” even if you don’t use them directly on databases. I suspect the majority of people haven’t studied normalisation so wouldn’t have known how to start to tackle the questions in an efficient manner.

For a general quiz it probably went a little deep and if I hadn’t learnt normalisation 5-year ago I might have been stumped.

By: malikyte

malikyte — Thu, 21 Dec 2006 22:44:55 +0000

I think mrsmiley hit some good points. I too read this while at work. I felt bad that the last entry was a ghost town of replies, so I spent a few moments after I got home to at least do a quick overview of the underlying data. I am interested to learn this stuff, but unless it’s literally homework from a course I’ve paid for, I don’t think I’d necessarily want to spend the time when I could spend that time researching things I’m currently going down the path on.

I do, however, find any and all previously unknown information to be very valuable, no matter the form it’s in.

By: mrsmiley

mrsmiley — Thu, 21 Dec 2006 22:10:20 +0000

I think the key to getting people involved is having questions that can stand on their own. The problem with getting involved in this one is it required you to have done your research on the first episode. If they are going to continue to build on each other, you will probably find the participation level dropping as well.

Episode 3 was a raging success because you could read it, have a crack at it and get back on with work without too much effort. I cant vouch for anyone else reading these, but I check this while I’m at work. I don’t have time for anything more complicated than a “quiz”. As soon as it starts heading down the “exam” route I give up and get back to work.

There really is two camps here, the designers and the engineers (developers). I read a case study once on creating a viral marketing campaign for engineers. The trick was to create something that was enough of a challenge for the engineer ego that catered for all levels of skill, yet quick enough to complete to increase the participation level. From memory they were asked to design a trebuchet (catapult) to throw a particular object the furthest.

For majority of web devs databases are something you just have to deal with, not necessarily something they necessarily find intresting. For me personally, I find the storage of the data interesting coming from a content management background, but I couldn’t care less what the form of normalisation it is in. Mind you, I’ve never been one heavy into the theory side of things. Unless you are going to specialise in a particular field or devote 10 hrs a day to research, the world of web development only affords you enough time to learn to get the job done and hopefully learn something for next time. As you so rightly pointed out at the start of this, we are required to be experts in too many areas.

By: malikyte

malikyte — Thu, 21 Dec 2006 03:29:24 +0000

Is there any sort of trick in understand how a spreadsheet is displayed in a normal form, and identifying the keys? I seriously thought it was completely presentational and couldn’t follow it a single bit. Perhaps one of my problems was that I’m using the Office 2007 beta and couldn’t figure out where the PivotTable option was to see if the data was laid out from certain aspects…that is, if that’s how you managed to discover the normal form.

I’m afraid the answer will be as simple as “Google it!”, but I’m imagining there’s more to it than that.