Top all-time · #4530
William Kent
Personal blog · bkent.netdataprogramming
William Kent writes William (Bill) Kent, a personal blog at bkent.net about data and programming. Since 2008, 17 different Hacker News readers have linked it 22 times, most often “A Simple Guide to Five Normal Forms in Relational Database Theory”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Too few sampled comments (8) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link William Kent's personal site for his database modelling writing: a guide to the five normal forms, and excerpts from Data and Reality on the limits of modelling real-world information.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 8 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- A Simple Guide to Five Normal Forms in Relational Database Theory4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2010-04-16
- Data and Reality (1978)3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2020-01-11
- /Doc/darxrp.htm2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2008-11-26
- A Simple Guide to Five Normal Forms in Relational Database Theory (1982)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-08-09
What Hacker News says?
Thanks for these insights and listing these alternatives in one place and showing their commonalities (like tagging, hierarchies, and parsing/subdividing). One book I have found interesting along those lines is "The Discipline of Organizing". https://berkeley.pressbooks.pub/tdo4p/ Tangentially, William Kent's "Data and Reality" (the first two editions especially) also explores the larger meta-issues of moving from h…
Comment linking /Doc/darxrp.htm
on “The PARA Method: A Universal System for Organizing Digital Information”Submitted A Simple Guide to Five Normal Forms in Relational Database Theory as a story · 135 points
HN discussionThe upvotes could also mean that people appreciate a good presentation of introductory material, and they may see a use for it as something to send to the newbies on their team. For this subject, I usually send people to Bill Kent's Guide to the Five Normal Forms: http://www.bkent.net/Doc/simple5.htm
Comment linking /Doc/simple5.htm
on “Understanding database normalisation: a very short tutorial”Submitted A Simple Guide to Five Normal Forms in Relational Database Theory (1982) as a story · 133 points
HN discussionComing back a day later, now that I've finished "Data and Reality", to say the very last pages of the book are "About Bill Kent". In particular, it gives a reference to Bill's web site http://www.bkent.net , which includes a list of his personal and academic [1] writing over 35 years. I was actually astonished to find his web site still running, 17 years after his death in 2005. How many of our own digital artefacts…
Comment linking /catalogsource.htm
on “Read “Data and Reality””Submitted Data and Reality (1978) as a story · 40 points
HN discussionThe author's webpage on the book with excerpts for more info. - https://www.bkent.net/Doc/darxrp.htm More of the author's works - https://www.bkent.net/catalogsource.htm
Comment linking /catalogsource.htm
on “Older editions of which books were better than the new ones? (2010)”Submitted A Simple Guide to Five Normal Forms in Relational Database Theory (1982) as a story · 14 points
HN discussionI think I understand this "Cartesian product" reasoning behind 4NF/5NF, I just find it irrelevant I guess. Cartesian product is explained in Kent: case (3) in https://www.bkent.net/Doc/simple5.htm#label4.1 ("A "cross-product" form, where for each employee, there must be a record for every possible pairing of one of his skills with one of his languages") I do not explicitly mention this Cartesian product even tho it…
Comment linking /Doc/simple5.htm
on “5NF and Database Design”Submitted A simple guide to 5 normal forms as a story · 8 points
HN discussionIn addition to whatever textbook you decide on you should read Bill Kent's "Data and Reality" to widen your awareness of the profound difficulties involved in stuffing messy reality into a collection of bits. See http://www.authorhouse.com/BookStore/ItemDetail.aspx?bookid=... and http://www.bkent.net/Doc/darxrp.htm .
Comment linking /Doc/darxrp.htm
on “Ask HN: Help me find a good databases textbook”Submitted A Simple Guide to Five Normal Forms in Relational Database Theory (1982) as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI find myself coming back to Data and Reality on a periodic basis to remind me that the model is just the model. https://www.bkent.net/Doc/darxrp.htm
Comment linking /Doc/darxrp.htm
on “Unnatural Keys – Nature doesn’t come with identifiers”Submitted Measurement Data (1996) [pdf] as a story · 2 points
HN discussionHi, CS graduate here. during my post-graduation unemployed year I have been wrestling with this question a lot. The answer is that there is none - the research on the practice of translating requirements into code has stopped in the 1970s with Structured Programming (Dijkstra) and Problem Frames (Jackson). There is a certain inspiration people had with reusable patterns of problems a la Alexander, but after some tim…
Comment linking /Doc/manyform.htm
on “Software Engineering fundamentals matter more”Submitted A Simple Guide to Five Normal Forms in Relational Database Theory (1982) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Measurement Data (1996) [pdf] as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Measurement Data (1996) [pdf] as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Data and Reality [1978/1998] as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted What Is an Object? as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
