RE: DDS field reference equivalent in SQL -- MIDRANGE-L

At every place I have ever worked, there are an abundance of projects dealing with field expansions. In my experience, most shops set up CustID as the customer number used by users. Years ago many set these fields as numeric, and have had to change them to alpha, or expand these types of fields.

And yes, as organizations grow, price and qty and other fields expand past what a developer anticipated 10 or 20 years ago.

Without a field reference file, and without using the "LIKE" in RPG to inherit field attributes, these things cost companies lots of money to expand.

-----Original Message-----
From: midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Matt Olson
Sent: Tuesday, October 30, 2012 11:27 AM
To: 'Midrange Systems Technical Discussion'
Subject: RE: DDS field reference equivalent in SQL

Yes, CustID should be a meaningless primary key. Why would the datatype for PRICE ever change? If it did because your developers didn't have to foresight to design the price column to be a numeric field to enough decimal places? The future maintenance cost seems negligible in a properly normalized database structure.

-----Original Message-----
From: Stone, Joel [mailto:Joel.Stone@xxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Tuesday, October 30, 2012 11:13 AM
To: 'Midrange Systems Technical Discussion'
Subject: RE: DDS field reference equivalent in SQL

Soooo - are you stating that you have CustID in only one table???

Even if you replace CustID with a meaningless immutable primary key, you would still have boatloads of fields such as PRICE that a reference back to a single place where one could inherit the attributes would reduce future maintenance costs significantly, don't you think?

-----Original Message-----
From: midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Matt Olson
Sent: Tuesday, October 30, 2012 11:05 AM
To: 'Midrange Systems Technical Discussion'
Subject: RE: DDS field reference equivalent in SQL

You might want to ask yourself why you would need such functionality in the first place. In a properly normalized database design you will not have duplicitive data in multiple tables.

Better get your developers up to speed with this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_normalization

-----Original Message-----
From: Stone, Joel [mailto:Joel.Stone@xxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Tuesday, October 30, 2012 10:11 AM
To: 'Midrange Systems Technical Discussion'
Subject: DDS field reference equivalent in SQL

An important part of making field length changes easier on Iseries is to use a field reference file to inherit attributes from other fields & files.

Is there an equivalent in SQL?

Thanks

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