Re: Varchar for All fields....

bijuv@my-dejanews.com wrote: > > Thanks All for your reply ... > > Well ,The fact is that He is doing these comparisons with "C". > He is saying that in C, he used Chars to store dates and all other > decimal values !!!!. In his opinion , It is a common practice in Modeling to > have all the fields Varchars( he has been doing it for the last 5 years !) and > then uses the Functions and Procedures to do the work ..... > > Strange Modeling ! I wonder these models really exist ? I think I know this guy, worked with someone very like him at Bell Labs 7 years ago. That guy wanted to use sed and awk scripts to analyse the telephone long distance calling detail for all of northern California (several hundred million records a day) using a flat file data store. Yup sounds like the same guy to me. I liked him, he was directly responsible for me getting a contract to write a sensible analysis suite after management deduced that it would take 5 years to analyse each month's records! Using real database stores and a real programming language I got that estimate down to 4 hours (obviously the analysis was non-trivial). When I left that project I was told to hand off to this guy. After I spent 3 hours explaining the algorithms and database structures and reviewing the C source he wistfully explained his plan to see if he could implement my complex heuristic analytical algorithms in awk or if he would need to stoop to using Perl! Definitely sounds like the same guy to me! Art S. Kagel Art S. Kagel