domingo, 27 de julio de 2008

Summer holidays

Next friday I'll start my summer familiar holidays. We'll rest a few days in the Spanish Tropical Coast (Motril Tourism).

I will finish some Hibernate exercises before, and then I will try to read something about J2EE and discover how clumsy I have become in the last four years. I have chosen that document:

Your first cup: An introduction to Java EE Platform

I'll be back by 19th August, when I will finally join CCHS-CSIC, which is not a trade union as its name could suggest, but main spanish research centre in Social Sciences and Humanities.

Remember I'm moving to Wiki Bellugalia.

See you soon.

jueves, 17 de julio de 2008

Entity - Attribute - Value modelling

I've spent the last four years modelling and programming an Entity-Attribute-Value (EAV) database without knowing that was the name for it.

I will explain EAV with a very short example.

Table ANALYSIS
---------------------
IdAnalysis
Date
XCoor
YCoor
UTMHuse

Table RESULT
------------------
IdAnalysis
IdComponent
IdValue

Table COMPONENT
------------------------
IdComponent
ComponentDefinition
Unit

Where analysis owns several results, and the kind and number of components in every analysis varies.

EAV modelling becomes from deep normalizing low estructured data. At first, I was strong supportting EAV because opponent's solution was just no-normalization at all.

But as time went by, I realised useful views was neede in order to work with data, and to design forms for these tables was not very clean.

So EAV modelling is an example about how technical users or plain users can diverge in their models, and how they both should be equally satisfied.

That's something I would like to dive in in this research. We will see.

Burocracia solucionada

Los problemas burocráticos han sido solucionados, aunque todavía no estoy trabajando.

Por ello vuelvo a la pre investigación.

domingo, 6 de julio de 2008

Re-starting

I'm trying to re-start this work, but I have to struggle with some burocratic issues:

- to join a PhD programme in an University
- to join my new job, and try to make this project part of it

Soon I will write a brief technical text about database design, and perhaps, once I manage to solve these problems, in september, I will move to a new blog or make some changes here. Let's see.