Database & Application Miscellaneous: Zipf's Law

• aeneumann / 212 / Sun, 31 Jan 2010 00:53:00 GMT / Comments (2)
• Does anyone know if Zipf's law is still being used in the design of
  corporate database software?
• Keywords:

  zipf, law, database, application

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• 1. On Feb 16, 9:28 am, "A E Neumann" <NonDigi......gmail.com> wrote:
     > Does anyone know if Zipf's law is still being used in the design of
     > corporate database software?
     >From Wikipedia:
     Originally, Zipf's law stated that, in a corpus of natural language
     utterances, the frequency of any word is roughly inversely
     proportional to its rank in the frequency table. So, the most frequent
     word will occur approximately twice as often as the second most
     frequent word, which occurs twice as often as the fourth most frequent
     word, etc. The term has come to be used to refer to any of a family of
     related power law probability distributions.
     
     What is the relevance of Zipf's law to software ?

     carlfederl | Fri, 16 May 2008 22:05:00 GMT |

  2. >> What is the relevance of Zipf's law to software ? <<
     
     It occurs in programming languages and in data. Also known as Yule's
     distribution. When I am looking at a DB, I look for a Gaussian, a
     Zipf, or a Poisson distribution -- it tells you somethign about what
     is causing the data. Then there are some other laws about the
     distribution of digits.

     celko | Fri, 16 May 2008 22:06:00 GMT |