Tuples
“It is better to keep silence and be thought a fool, than to say ‘tuple’ and remove all doubt.”
But recently people have been using the word “tuple” more frequently. Doubtless all those people know that in relational databases a tuple (or a tuple value) is a formal term for a row of a table. It’s possible to know a bit more than that.
Pronounced Tyoople, Toople, or Tuhple?
The Oxford Dictionaries site says Tyoople. Other dictionaries are neutral about the terms from which Tuple was derived (sextuple, octuple, etc.), for example Merriam-Webster says they usually end in Toople but Tuhple is an accepted alternate, and the Oxford Canadian Dictionary says it’s always Tuhple. So the question comes down to: what is the proper way in a database context?
I found one book that says Tuple rhymes with Scruple, that is, it’s Toople: Rod Stephens, Beginning Database Design Solutions. But Mr Stephens also tells us that tables are called relations because “the values of a row are related”, so I’m wary about him.
I found four books that say Tuple rhymes with Couple, that is, it’s Tuhple:
- David Kroenke, Database Processing: Fundamentals, Design and Implementation
- Kevin Loney, Oracle9i The Complete Reference
- Donald Burleson, Oracle High-Performance SQL Tuning
- Paul Nielsen, SQL Server 2005 Bible
Then I found the decisive one:
C.J.Date, An Introduction To Database Systems.
I quote:
The relational model therefore does not use the term “record” at all; instead it uses the term “tuple” (rhymes with “couple”).
Since C.J.Date had many conversations with the The Founder (E.F.Codd), and Mr Codd would have been certain to correct Mr Date if he had mispronounced, this is decisive. Most writers in the field, including the one who ought to know, are saying that it rhymes with couple.
Wait a minute — couple was originally a French word, and the French would use an oo sound, what about that? A good explanation, although it’s based on analogy, is that some Middle English words with oo (like blood and flood) changed in stages from the oo sound to the uh sound in the centuries following the Great English Vowel Shift. See the Wikipedia article about Phonological history of English high back vowels. So the reply to people who say “etymologically it was an oo sound” would be “yes, but oo changed to uh as part of a trend, get modern”.
But what if it’s a non-relational tuple?
Quoting C.J.Date again (from The Relational Database Dictionary):
NOTE: Tuples as defined in the relational model differ in certain respects from the mathematical construct of the same name. In particular, tuples in mathematics typically don’t have named attributes; instead, their attributes are identified by their ordinal position, left to right.
Aha. So if a sequence of values doesn’t have a corresponding header with a sequence of column names, it shouldn’t be called a row (that would be relational) but it could be called a tuple — provided it’s not in a relational database. In practice that’s seems to be a fairly common usage, but I’ll highlight the products where it seems to be the preferred usage.
- Tuple Spaces.
The modest idea of just filling a space with tuples, and calling it a
“tuple space”, started off in 1982 with a language named Linda. Since then the general concept has gotten into various Java implementations. - Python.
The tuple is a supported data type that’s part of the Python core.
Of course there are similar things in other languages but I believe
that Python is the most prominent language that actually calls it a
tuple. - Pig.
- FoundationDB.
- Tarantool.
Actually one of my current projects is enhancing Tarantool’s documentation, which is what led me to wonder about the word.
The MySQL manual usually avoids the term, although it’s more frequent with NDB.
Alas
Recently I saw a poll with a single question:
What is to be Done? (a) Nothing (b) Something
I think that (a) won, hurrah. And yet it would have been a finer world if everyone had agreed that “tuple” meant a sequence of values, “record” meant a sequence of values which had fixed types, and “row” meant a sequence of values which had both fixed types and fixed names. If only Mr Codd had left the vocabulary alone …
