Talk:Table creation/Postal addresses
Again this is a nebulous task. Are we talking only database servers or a structured data file in any language?
- Also, address formats vary by country. (Yes, really!) For the purposes of comparison, additional constraints on the task should be made. —Dkf 20:31, 10 May 2009 (UTC)
- OK, I've tried to clarify this task to allow more languages to participate and to make the results easier to compare; after all, the point isn't to write full business logic for a global application, but rather to show off table creation. —Dkf 11:54, 24 May 2009 (UTC)
Rename this task
TL;DR:
- The problem domain ("Database") needs to be in the title to avoid ambiguity.
- The example data set used ("Postal addresses") doesn't need to be in the title.
- Therefore I propose to rename this page to "Database/Table creation".
Regarding (1): The word "Table" is used for many different concepts in programming, and "table creation" could refer to completely different things, like creating a hash-table data structure, or generating a nicely formatted ASCII table, etc. The title needs to make it clear we're talking about database tables here.
Regarding (2): The problem to be solved, is to create a database table using some common field types. "Postal addresses" was simply chosen as the data set used to showcase this problem in a practical way. The task wouldn't be fundamentally different if it asked to create a database table for any other kind of practical data set. So there's no need to include it in the title.
Any objections? --Smls (talk) 12:52, 31 July 2016 (UTC)
Database language?
It seems the creator of the tasks had Oracle or SQL Server in mind. But statistical software is often used to store addresses. Even Excel is used for such data. A question then: is it allowed to simply create an empty table with such software? There is already a case: while SAS sems to be using SQL, it actually creates a "classic" SAS dataset, with integrated SQL syntax. Along with SAS, R and Stata are perfectly able to store data tables, though none of them may be considered a database language. I'll add a Stata example to show this.