Re: S.O.D.A. database Query API - call for comments

In comp.databases Carl Rosenberger <carl_at_db4o.com> wrote:
> class Person
> CommunicationMedium[] comMedia;
> class CommunicationMedium
> class Phone extends CommunicationMedium
> class MobilePhone extends Phone
>
> "I would like to know all Persons, that don't have a mobile phone."

I've been thinking very hard about indexing, scoring and searching lately. News articles, software documentation, music, etc, etc - it all should be indexed and eventually scored somehow, and the power user should have powerful tools for searching around.

The common thing now is a situation with RDBMS'es in the back-end, some tables with references between them, and frontend web tools that creates simple SQL queries to handle the data.

This approach has a lot of weaknesses. For one thing, you cannot create really advanced queries. For another thing, as you (implicitly) state, SQL is not a very nice language. There exists several libraries for making it a bit simpler to generate SQL queries, i.e. from web inputs, but still the limitations of the SQL standard shines through.

I do have quite some ideas about some general libraries that can be used in other software projects. I think the possibilities for organizing and scoring data, and then search for particular records should be needed in almost any application ... email clients, address books ... you name it. It might be interessting to have a look at object oriented DB systems, though I was originally thinking of building my system on the top of a traditional RDBMS/SQL system. It should be possible to use SQL somehow.

I'll post back about my ideas at a later stage.

-- 
Tobias Brox, freelance hacker for hire.
Good at solving problems.
+47 98660706 / tobiasb_at_suptra.org