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I am getting back in to CodeReview, and was reviewing one of my SEDE queries which pointed me to this question:

https://codereview.stackexchange.com/questions/127837/flattened-data-model-and-nosql-data-structure

There are no operations in this code, only data declarations. The question is unclear as to what he is going to use the data structure for..

I downvoted it, but really it seems an unanswerable question to me, and I would like some community feedback before voting to close.

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    \$\begingroup\$ That question is bad for a number of reasons. Being about data structures is possibly but one of them. For one it asks for proofreading of code, secondly it gives no context whatsoever and thirdly it's most probably pseudocode. That said I find your question rather intriguing and I'll try to write up my thoughts later \$\endgroup\$
    – Vogel612
    Commented Jul 12, 2016 at 23:47
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    \$\begingroup\$ If the only tool I had wasn't a hammer, then I would vote to close. \$\endgroup\$
    – Simon Forsberg
    Commented Jul 13, 2016 at 7:08

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Questions asking to have a database schema reviewed are on-topic. However, without any background information about what the application does, this code cannot be meaningfully reviewed. I recommend closing it as "Unclear what you are asking" or an off-topic generic best-practices question.

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As 200_success already mentioned, we have previously decided that database schema reviews are on topic. This consensus is from back in 2011 though and it may be beneficial to revisit this decision.

Notable:

  • Database schema reviews are also on-topic for DBA.SE.
  • Schemas / Designs are not necessarily code, questions for this sometimes get asked with images of UML-Diagrams or similar.
  • Schema / Design reviews require significant explanation of the context. Many posts do not provide enough context to review all aspects of a schema.
  • "Design" Questions are generally on-topic, but only if they include real code that's implementing that design. It stands to debate whether DDL or (dumb) Data Structures (JSON, PO(C|J)Os, ...) are actually "code". (note: they are source-code alright. Whether they are semantically meaningful is IMO a different discussion)

Overall the question boils down to where we draw the line in the sand about what's (semantically meaningful) code and what is not. I personally don't consider code that has no purpose other than storing a few values and providing manipulations to these values without any further logic to be semantically meaningful. When code can be generated by an IDE I usually ignore the question...
Alternatively the proposal of 200_success seems appropriate for questions about design that are not meaningfully reviewable.

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  • \$\begingroup\$ I was very confused as to why you started talking about DBase... \$\endgroup\$
    – Shepmaster
    Commented Jul 15, 2016 at 19:49

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