[Tfug] Inheritance in RDBMS's (PostgreSQL, Oracle, et al.)

[Bexley Hall]

Hi Terence,

> > If the base type is well
> > defined addition can be easy.  Doing  versioning can
> > become a snap  because base columns are there and
> > additional columns are there based on version. 
> 
> I'm not sure I understand how this is a
> consequence of inheritance?
> Could you elaborate?

> I was referring to
> typical evolution of schema and relations, where there is
> the discovery that new data points are to be collected for a
> relation.  The table is based on the base type and as you
> evolve the schema new types are created to represent the new
> view of the data model.    The Application then can tell
> by the object returned the version of the object and thus
> the code path to properly work with the data.  Generally
> this would be done by dummy'ing up the missing data. 

Ahhh! (epiphany)  Yes, that is really slick!  I'm not
sure it would apply in my case... but its worth keeping
in the back of my mind.

Thanks!
--don