Many years ago I first started thinking about relationships. At that point, I was studying language and linguistics in preparation for what I thought would be a career in teaching English. That relationship didn't work out.
Many years later I discovered MS Access and fell in love all over again, starting another relationship that's lasted quite a bit longer.
What I didn't realize at the time, though, is that much of what I'd learned about rhetorical competence way back in the 70's was applicable to understanding normalization in developing relational database applications some 20 years later. And it's still relevant today as a I look back over several decades of a (mostly) enjoyable career.
Specifically, the linear legacy in both careers is that relationships are at the heart of everything.
The concepts behind Bloc Discourse* included the realization that comprehension of the content of any individual block of text is only one of the skills needed to understand expository discourse. There is a higher level principle at work. That principle depends on understanding the relationships between various units of discourse--sentences and paragraphs as well as longer blocs.
These days, when I try to explain Normalization to new developers, I often call upon a metaphor that combines both relational database design and rhetorical competence.
First, I like to think of Entities as the database counterpart of Nouns and phrases in a natural language. They are the names of things of interest.
Second, Entities and nouns don't stand alone. We need Attributes to provide the detail that makes our Entities meaningful within a context. They are the counterparts of adjectives in a natural language. They provide the nuance and flavor that distinguish one instance of an entity from another. The red car as opposed to the blue car. In a table of cars, therefore, we have a field called "CarColor" to hold that attribute of each car.
And third, in order to construct meaningful sentences, we need the linking words, verbs in a natural language and relationships in a database language. "Customers PURCHASE cars." "Dealers SELL cars."
All three components are required to communicate meaningfully, whether we are talking about a technical article describing the structure of discourse or a relational database application describing the sales operation of Red and Blue Motor Car Company.
*A Pedagogical Model of Discourse, Willis J. Pitkin, 1973
