Re: Why is MySQL more chosen over PostgreSQL?

On Wed, 31 Jul 2002, Christopher Kings-Lynne wrote:

> > I highly doubt that. Relating two tables to each other via a key, and
> > joining them together, allows you to do everything that inheritance
> > allows you to do, but also more. If you have difficulty with keys and
> > joins, well, you really probably want to stop and fix that problem
> > before you do more work on a relational database....
>
> I'm still not convinced of this.  For example, my friend has a hardware
> e-store and every different class of hardware has different properties.  ie
> modems have baud and network cards have speed and video cards have ram.  He
> simply just has a 'products' table from which he extends
> 'networkcard_products', etc. with the additional fields.  Easy.

And what's the problem with networkcard_products being a separate table
that shares a key with the products table?

    CREATE TABLE products (product_id int, ...)
    CREATE TABLE networkcard_products_data (product_id int, ...)
    CREATE VIEW networkcard_products AS
	SELECT products.product_id, ...
	FROM products
	JOINT networkcard_products_data USING (product_id)

What functionality does table inheritance offer that this traditional
relational method of doing things doesn't?

cjs
-- 
Curt Sampson  <cjs@cynic.net>   +81 90 7737 2974   http://www.netbsd.org
    Don't you know, in this new Dark Age, we're all light.  --XTC