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From: pscaaf@vms.macc.wisc.edu (Ron Peterson)
Newsgroups: comp.databases
Subject: Re: Ingres is making me mad!!
Message-ID: <1249@dogie.edu>
Date: 27 Feb 89 17:39:31 GMT
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In article <354@daitc.daitc.mil>, jkrueger@daitc.daitc.mil (Jonathan Krueger) writes...

>In article <1229@dogie.edu>, pscaaf@vms (Ron Peterson) writes:
>>If you will represent the response of several questions as one column using
>>character strings you will reduce the number of columns that you will need.
>>"ynuyn" would correspond to 5 questions y n u y n
> 
>How do you remove a question?
> 
>Yes, it can be done.  But workarounds that preserve at least 1NF are
>highly desirable.
> 
I was not being very clear.  Assuming that the same questionaire is given
to everyone, my example would pertain to questions 1 thru 5.  A question
could not be removed.  However, it is usually unsafe to remove columns in
a table.  1NF would not be violated because there are a fixed number of
replies.  If the relational database can handle more columns or if the users
have a reasonable amount of database training, I would not use this technique.
It depends on the the database having good string manipulation functions, which
are sometimes absent.