One of the reasons women will find this repugnant is because they didn’t normalize their tables. Should be boyfriend_id is null.
They allowed business logic to pollute the DB table, and “small waist” is a defined range in some confluence doc somewhere.
Or this is an analytics database where these are well-defined dimensions added for segmentation logic. 🤷
Why is there a separate table for men and women in the first place? Shouldn’t there be a person table with a many to many relationship with itself (because polyamory exists)?
To that point a person table with a relationship table. So this way you can reference relationship between two or more persons within the relationship table and that could be joined to the person table if needed. I don’t think you’d really be able to keep it within one table while exploring multiple relationships unless you’re storing a list of ids that is interpreted outside of sql. Also a relationship table would allow exploring other types of relationships such as exes, love interests, coworkers, family, friends, etc
Yeah it’d be a person table, and the relationship table indicating the ids of shipped couples. Do you think there’d need to be a status in the relationship table so we can tombstone exes? Or maybe started and ended date columns for each relationship so we can figure out whose cheating on who. But when about on-off relationships then? How would we model Ross and Rachel?
Maybe it’s supposed to imply that boyfriend is an attribute of the particular girl. Like saying she isn’t someone’s boyfriend. It’s probably a holdover from the original data architecture and nobody ever bothered to modify the table later on in case there’s a select somewhere that expects that field to exist.
That structure doesn’t handle polyamorous and cheating relationships very well. It should probably have and (select top 1 1 from dbo.relationships r where r.partner_a != GIRLS.id or r.partner_b != GIRLS.id) which would handle also LGBT+ relationships or relationships that are better represented as a graph.
