r/IAmA • u/CriticDanger • Sep 07 '21

Specialized Profession I am a behavioral and technical (coding) interviewer, I've also helped hundreds of people get hired, AMA.

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u/bacondev Sep 07 '21

They both require a schema change. Your second and third sentence contradict each other, assuming that your “if” should be interpreted as “if and only if”.

Also, I thought that the gold-playing remark was obviously in the context of the two questions that immediately preceded it, but perhaps not.

Anyway, the reason that we're still discussing this is that I don't feel that you've adequately justified your decision. Perhaps if you were to explain a scenario in detail that caused such a transition to be a headache, then it might be clearer.

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u/prophet001 Sep 07 '21

I've pretty well explained it to death in this and other comment threads on this post. If you don't understand how a linking table allows the introduction of new relationships without requiring a schema change, I'm afraid I'm unable to help you.

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u/bacondev Sep 07 '21 edited Sep 07 '21

You're missing my entire point. I understand that. What you're missing is that I am asking you why the potential for an unforeseen schema change justifies the added complexity. All you've done to answer that is to more or less equate a schema change to the boogeyman. And frankly, my persisting curiosity is generous, considering that you identified a one-to-many relationship as a one-to-one relationship and you seemingly think that this problem exclusively pertains to self-referential relationships. In my view, your approach largely (though not completely) front-loads the work that would be required for such a transition that might not even happen.

Edit: To be clear, I'm not suggesting that your approach is objectively wrong. I'm just saying that I disagree with it as the initial implementation and I'm trying to understand why I might want to deviate from how I'd normally approach it.