--CELKO-- wrote:
The basic principle of a tiered architecture is that display is done in
the front end and never in the back end. This a more basic programming
principle than just SQL and RDBMS.
So be sure to comment the code so people will know that you are
destroying 1NF on purpose and do not know about C/S architecture. That
might help someone maintian the code and correct it after you are gone.
There are perfectly legitimate reasons for collapsing multiple rows
into one on the back end. Perhaps you've got a presentation team that
needs all the items on a single row - to avoid expanding their result
set? You could just write a query for them (they might not be able
to), but maybe it's safer to put that into a view and support it on the
back end. Or maybe for performance reasons you put the data into an
indexed summary table using partitioning/mdc/etc based on that query.
Or maybe someone has a commercial product, or an interface to a
commercial product. And in this case they don't give you the option of
adding an entire table to describe your list well - they only give you
a single column. You'll have to make do.
But other than that, your comment was probably very valuable.
buck