View updating in practice?

Dear reader,

I wonder if anybody uses view updates in practice and if so what kind of updates on what kind of views.

Personally, I believe that view updates are dangerous in most situations as users cannot understand what is going on. To give two simple examples: In case of deletions from projections, users delete tuples they do not know completely. In case of insertions into joins, users do not know whether they are actually inserting into both operand relations or whether there was a dangling tuple in any of the operand relations that gets "absorbed" by the newly inserted tuple. It is easy to see that users will not be able to undo their view updates (such that the old _database_ state is reached) using further view updates in the above situations. If a was a user of such a database I would be very irritated.

I wrote a paper on this topic for ICDT'03. (Take a look at http://dbms.uni-muenster.de/publications/downloads/view-updates.pdf if you are interested in the details.) Unfortunately, the paper got rejected, but I'm not convinced by the reviewers' critique ;) Now, I would like to know what people do in practice. My questions are as follows:

1. Do you use view updates? What is the scenario?
2. If you do _not_ use view updates, did you at least think about using them? If so, what was the application scenario and why did you not implement it (e.g., no support by DBMS or too complicated for users)?
3. Does anybody use SQL:1999 INSTEAD triggers to implement view updates?

I would be delighted if anybody out there was willing to share their experiences with me.

Thanks in advance,

Jens

Follow-up set to: comp.databases.theory Received on Fri Nov 08 2002 - 08:18:07 CST