Joe Celko's SQL Programming Style by Joe Celko

Author:Joe Celko [Celko, Joe]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-08-047883-8
Publisher: Elsevier Science
Published: 2005-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

5.2.6 Vector Encoding

A vector is made up of a fixed number of components. These components can be ordered or unordered, but are always present. They can be of fixed or variable length. The components can be dependent or independent of each other, but the code applies to a single entity and makes sense only as a whole unit. Punctuation, symbol-set changes, or position within the code can determine the components of the vector.

The most common example is a date, whose components are month, day, and year. The parts have some meaning by themselves, but the real meaning is in the vector—the date—as a whole because it is a complete entity. The different date formats used in computer systems give examples of all the options. The three components can be written in year-month-day order, month-day-year order, or just about any other way you wish.

The limits on the values for the day depend on the year (is it a leap year or not?) and the month (28, 29, 30, or 31 days?). The components can be separated by punctuation (12/1/2005, using slashes and American date format), symbol-set changes (2005 DEC 01, using digits-letters-digits), or position (20051201, using positions 1 to 4, 5 to 6, and 7 to 8 for year, month, and day, respectively).

Another example is the ISO code for tire sizes, which is made up of a wheel diameter (scaled in inches), a tire type (abbreviation code), and a width (scaled in centimeters). Thus, 15R155 means a 15-inch radial tire that is 155 millimeters wide, whereas 15SR155 is a steel-belted radial tire with the same dimensions. Despite the mixed American and ISO units, this is a general physical description of a tire in a single code.

Vector schemes are informative and allow you to pick the best scheme for each component, but they have to be disassembled to get to the components (many database products provide special functions to do this for dates, street addresses, and people’s names). Sorting by components is difficult unless you want them in the order given in the encoding; try to sort the tire sizes by construction, width, and diameter instead of by diameter, construction, and width.

Another disadvantage is that a bad choice in one component can destroy the usefulness of the whole scheme. Another problem is extending the code. For example, if the standard tire number had to be expanded to include thickness in millimeters, where would that measurement go? Another number would have to be separated by apunctuation mark. It could not be inserted into a position inside the code without giving ambiguous codes. The code cannot be easily converted to a fixed-position vector encoding without changing many of the database routines.

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