I should update while sober...
Earlier tonight, I wanted to update my journal with some rants on a recent lawsuit, but now I've drank too much to be coherent on it, but I'll try to do a little bit.
Basically, some company is suing a bunch of websites over "patent infringement" because those other sites violated the patent on website database setups. This whole thing is a bunch of bullshit. The lawsuit basically contents that the first company patented the concept of foreign keys and any company that uses foreign keys in their code is violating a patent.
For those unfamiliar with foreign keys, this is one of the fundamental pieces of a relational database. The patent was filed in Dec 2001, but even I had used foreign keys prior to that date. A foreign key is essential for linking records on different databases together.
For instance, lets say I had a database containing houses. Each entry corresponds to one house, and there is an entry in there for my house. That entry lists things like the color of the walls, the carpet color, the address, etc. In another database contains each person, so there is one for me, one for Chris, one for Scott, one for David (my three roommates). So in the database for the people, you have an entry containing the ID number for the house. So when you try to see what color walls I have, you look me up, and then follow the ID number for the house to the houses table and get the wall color. This way, if Scott paints the walls, that table updates for all four of us.
In a nutshell, this is a foreign key, where a single number is used to tie multiple tables together. To patent this idea is insane. It's incredibly obvious and ridiculously widely used. If you wanna know how widely used it is, here's a test...
Think of a website, any website.
It uses foreign keys.
Yeah, I'm gonna do that. All websites. Okay, not every single one, but it's so close I'm going to feel okay using them all.
Anyway, I wanted to rant on that tonight, and I still kinda did, but I'm drunk. Bed time? I think so.
Basically, some company is suing a bunch of websites over "patent infringement" because those other sites violated the patent on website database setups. This whole thing is a bunch of bullshit. The lawsuit basically contents that the first company patented the concept of foreign keys and any company that uses foreign keys in their code is violating a patent.
For those unfamiliar with foreign keys, this is one of the fundamental pieces of a relational database. The patent was filed in Dec 2001, but even I had used foreign keys prior to that date. A foreign key is essential for linking records on different databases together.
For instance, lets say I had a database containing houses. Each entry corresponds to one house, and there is an entry in there for my house. That entry lists things like the color of the walls, the carpet color, the address, etc. In another database contains each person, so there is one for me, one for Chris, one for Scott, one for David (my three roommates). So in the database for the people, you have an entry containing the ID number for the house. So when you try to see what color walls I have, you look me up, and then follow the ID number for the house to the houses table and get the wall color. This way, if Scott paints the walls, that table updates for all four of us.
In a nutshell, this is a foreign key, where a single number is used to tie multiple tables together. To patent this idea is insane. It's incredibly obvious and ridiculously widely used. If you wanna know how widely used it is, here's a test...
Think of a website, any website.
It uses foreign keys.
Yeah, I'm gonna do that. All websites. Okay, not every single one, but it's so close I'm going to feel okay using them all.
Anyway, I wanted to rant on that tonight, and I still kinda did, but I'm drunk. Bed time? I think so.