Gay marriage: the database engineering perspective

http://qntm.org/?gay

by Sujan • 18 years ago

55 55 18 years ago

qntm.org

kirse2• 18 years ago

Is this how were going to sneak useless articles onto the front page now?

Take completely-unrelated-to-Hacking topic X and apply secondary "Engineering/Hacker opinion" Y to it?

"Well, condition Y now makes this Hacker-related, let's submit it!"

Sujan7• 18 years ago

Have you read it?

It is more about the connection of database engineering and "the real world" than about gay marriage.

kirse2• 18 years ago

I did, in fact, read the article before posting this, and would have been entirely fine with the article if it just objectively looked at the database issues without injecting...

-- This:

It's asinine to do it this way. However, there is a good reason why I haven't just skipped schemas (schemae?) One to Six. There are a lot of people in the world who actually think like this. This is their for-real, no-joking conception of "marriage". They do not grasp that men and women are interchangeable, as a result of which homosexual marriages create repulsive integrity problems in their heads. "But if they're both guys, which one is the wife?" How sad.

-- And this:

Finally we are reaching something which is non-stupid and non-sexist enough that it might actually exist somewhere in reality. This schema is reasonably sensible assuming you live in a fairly God-fearing administrative district.

-- And this...

As an aside, I have actually considered that laws against (or implicitly disallowing) gay marriage are, actually, sexist. For example, suppose I lived somewhere with antihomonuptial legislation. As I am a man, any woman in that district has the right to marry me. (As well they should.) But any man in that district who wanted to marry me does not have that right. The women have a right which the men do not have. Likewise, if there was a nubile woman nearby, I (and any other man) would have the right to marry that woman. But any nearby woman would not have that right. The men have a right which women do not have. Sexist!

Anti-gay-marriage laws throw a very real legislative dividing line between two sets of people on the world, and say, "all marriages must cross this line". But any law which divides men from women is clearly sexist, and, as I've stated above, closed-minded towards unconventional gender assignments who don't clearly fall on either side.

And there's plenty more I won't quote for the sake of brevity. The article has a full freaking ASIDE with personal opinion weighing into the issue of gay marriage, it's pretty damn obvious this is just political opinion. Political opinion with an Engineering slant, NOT something Hacker News worthy.

potatolicious2• 18 years ago

I find it very interesting because the solution he came to is actually how it works in many cultures - i.e. binary marriages.

Different cultures have different contexts when it comes to marriage. Some are monogamous, but even more are polygamous, where the husband marries the wives, or the wife marries the husbands... It all screams "graph", and I think in the end that's the only way we can represent it.

Which is funny, because that's already how we represent any other form of human relationships - romantic or otherwise...

gabrielroth• 18 years ago

Ah yes, sneaky. Because of course there's no way for HN readers to discover the full content of the article before voting on it.

syntax-case2• 18 years ago

I'll get downmodded for saying this, but HN is basically: web programming - the gay perspective.

Sujan7• 18 years ago

is this a minus or just a way to seperate these two things like in a headline or title? (sorry, not a native speaker. these little things sometimes irritate me)

silentbicycle3• 18 years ago

It's a pretty good article about how assumptions manifest in database schemas, sometimes unintentionally, and these can lead to major maintenance problems down the line.

huherto• 18 years ago

It was very interesting to me. Our start up is a dating site an I did not allow gay couples. It is not a moral thing, it just seemed that it made the database design very complicated. The article describes several approaches that may be useful to me.

kajecounterhack2• 18 years ago

Hey just a heads up: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2008/11/eharmony-...

yters4• 18 years ago

What a speciest. Or rather, what a sentiencetist. Sure, marrying myself is a tax scam, but marrying my rock isn't. My rock needs regular polishing, and why should sentient beings get all the rights? They just happen to have a more complex AI algorithm than my rock does, and that's not its fault.

He should get rid of the 'human' heading altogether and just have 'thing.' Plus, things aren't static, they are composed of matter, and the matter is always changing form and mixing and matching with other matter. Not sure how this should be represented, though. Maybe each particle should have its own entry, though those aren't static either.

Database design is tough.

Sujan7• 18 years ago

> Maybe each particle should have its own entry

Premature Databaseation...

yters4• 18 years ago

How would you construct the DB?

pavel_lishin• 18 years ago

It would make sense to me that every cell in your body is in a polygamist marriage, which is you, which can in turn marry other things.

But does that mean that your liver cell is married to your partner's brain cell? Not at all.

What this means is that marriages are potential partners as well! Model that.

lst3• 18 years ago

This kind of problems arise when people decide to change what Nature decided to be a Constant...

yan• 18 years ago

People are not part of nature?

Sujan7• 18 years ago

a hole is a hole...

lst3• 18 years ago

It seems I need to explain better:

Nature decided that so called "gays" (an artificial term, created in our modern times) can't procreate, so if you would make an island for them, good old Nature would answer with extinction...

(I think Nature is really discriminating here. Someone should sue It.)

gommm• 18 years ago

Well Nature (or God or whatever) decided that some people (through illness, genetical defect or whatever) are sterile and can't procreate... So they shouldn't be allowed to marry?

kiplinger3• 18 years ago

at some odd level, your post intrigues me, are you saying that gay relationships being "unnatural" is why design data around it is so tough?

mnemonicsloth2• 18 years ago

Does this kind of inquisitorial behavior really achieve anything?

kiplinger3• 18 years ago

I find this article kind of silly as it pertains to Gay Marriage as a political issue. The politicians who are voting (or in most cases, not voting) on this issue care little and understand less about the data management side of things, and furthermore when has government EVER been efficient?

Interesting from a database POV, though.

jrockway• 18 years ago

This article convinced me to write a blurb about why I like object databases:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=372935

Much cleaner than any of the models from the article, IMHO.

tdoggette• 18 years ago

I love Sam "sam512" Hughes, the owner of qntm.org. I first ran into his writing on Everything2, the old-but-not-dead collaborative writing site.

His science fiction is absolutely exemplary, especially the "Ed Stories" and the "Fine Structure" series. I would suggest that you all check it out, along with some of the other essays on qntm.org.

mnemonicsloth2• 18 years ago

His "How to Destroy The Earth" is a perfect example of a form we could use a lot more of these days -- comic science.

sridharvembu• 18 years ago

Here is fully normalized relational model. I will adopt a simple notation

Table: <PrimaryKeyID>, Column1, Column2

where the <> denotes the column to be primary key and Column1, Column2 etc. denote regular non-key attributes. The notation ForeignKeyID from SomeTable denotes a foreign key referring to a row in SomeTable.

Persons: <PersonID>, Name, DateOfBirth

Men and Women are defined in separate tables, to enforce integrity constraints later, which is why it is not modeled as a Gender attribute in Persons table. These tables have no attributes, simply a listing of men and women. It is a perfectly valid relation that has only one column, by the way. Note that the foreign key here is also the primary key of the table.

Men:<PersonID from Persons>

Women: <PersonID from Persons>

This represents a basic marriage, the only attribute of which is the date. Many specific forms of marriage are captured below.

Marraiges: <MarriageID>, DateOfMarriage

MarriageID is the primary key for the tables below. The design below permits polygamy, so further integrity constraints would be needed to restrict it. If a marriage is not permitted to be dissolved and no polygamy is permitted, we can place a uniqueness constraint on both Men and Women attributes below. If all types of marriages are permitted in all jurisdictions, these 3 tables below could be unified.

ConventionalMarriages: <MarriageID from Marriages>, PersonID from Men, PersonID from Women

GayMarriages: <MarriageID from Marriages>, PersonID from Men, PersonID from Men

LesbianMarriages: similar to above

Notice how a marriage has to exist for a divorce to exist

Divorces: <MarriageID from Marriages>, DivorceDate

Some features of the model: if a person A & B marry and then they terminate a marriage, and remarry again, it gets a new marriageID.

Some integrity constraints:

a) Zero or One marriage at a time rule:

If a PersonID occurs more than once in the Marriages table, then order the marriages by marriage date, order Divorces by DivorceDate, and enforce the rule:

  for all except last MarriageID in Ordered(Marriages), ensure Divorces(MarriageID) exists, and DivorceDate(MarriageID) < MarriageDate(next(MarriageID))

b) Polygamy would require more complex integrity constraints.

The nice thing about thinking about the problem relationally is that you focus on the data and its interrelationships, and avoid language considerations. Notice how a fully normalized relational model captures a lot of the constraints automatically, and only the most complex of constraints need to be separately stated.

Finally, note that this is an abstract model and should be separated from details of storage.

Gay marriage: the database engineering perspective

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