Looking for guidance

Help me out here a bit... I picked your name off the Normalization discussion group because I saw you took an interest in the topic and seemed to have been around a while. I do not think you made the edits, you have used your name in the past and the edits contain errors....

I notice that you and I have comparable job histories. I started in consulting in '82 at Andersen Houston. I am still doing it... lots of blah blah blah in between...

On the other extreme, I just made my 1st contribution. So I am looking for some mentoring.... you can contact me directly at bob.schmidt@wellpoint.com if you like. I am bschmidt in this site.

I placed:

EF Codd proposed the process of normalization in general and 1st normal form in particular in his extremely influential paper A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks Communications of the ACM, Vol. 13, No. 6, June 1970, pp. 377-387. Copyright © 1970, Association for Computing Machinery, Inc [1]

To put that paper into context, the first commercial computers were put into place in about 1952. COBOL was proposed in 1959 and first standardized in 1968. Codd is published in 1970. Codd's work is followed and perhaps eclipsed in 1981 by “Information Engineering”, James Martin and Clive Finkelstein, Savant Institute.

From Codd's paper…, "There is, in fact, a very simple elimination procedure which we shall call normalization." [His term eliminate is misleading, nothing is lost in normalization. Through decomposition nonsimple domains are replaced by "domains whose elements are atomic (nondecomposable) values." He uses the example of a person's "jobhistory" is replaced by lists of simpler elements such as "employer" and "title"],

That short selection emphasizes:

His conscious coining of the now very common term, normalization
His emphasis on solving the particular problem of what he called 'nonsimple' domains rather than making broader statements about semantics. Nonsimple is not a coinage that has stuck; it translates into 2005-speak as 'abstract data type' - a fittingly nonsimple term.

The concept of normalization is an essential milestone in the development of modern database design theory. Though Codd writes about data as strictly an input and output of data processing, you can find in his footnotes that he was beginning to think about problems as we do today. He writes, "Naturally, as with any data put into and retrieved from a computer system, the user will normally make far more effective use of the data if he is aware of its meaning." Amen. Bschmidt 15:08, 26 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

For your convenience, I have pasted below the edited work

History

Edgar F. Codd first proposed the process of normalization and what came to be known as the 1st normal form in his paper A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks Communications of the ACM, Vol. 13, No. 6, June 1970, pp. 377-387[2].

Codd stated:

There is, in fact, a very simple elimination* procedure which we shall call normalization. Through decomposition nonsimple domains are replaced by "domains whose elements are atomic (nondecomposable) values."

* His term eliminate is misleading, as nothing is "lost" in normalization.

In his paper, Codd consciously coined the term normalization and emphasized on solving a the problem of what he called "nonsimple" domains. The latter did not stick, and is currently referred to as abstract data type. Codd wrote about data as strictly an input and output of data processing, however, in some of his footnotes, he wrote, "Naturally, as with any data put into and retrieved from a computer system, the user will normally make far more effective use of the data if he is aware of its meaning."

My learning opportunity

why can I not see who edited my work?
I made a innocuous attempt at humor with the "AMEN" - out of bounds?
I read your interest in keeping the discussion on point so I ask you in particular, do you feel that my pp 2 was too much. (My point is to show that Codd's work is a part of a rolling conversation and not an immutable law.)
The other changes are permutations of the kinds of changes I am asking about above... except I wonder about the etiquette of stylistic changes. If the change is not based on an objective standard such as spelling ... then doesn't this process create a lot of disaffection?

Hope to hear from you... Bschmidt 03:46, 29 August 2005 (UTC) - Bob[reply]