Re: Distributed foreign keys (was Re: Category Types)

"daveb" <davebestOBVIOUS_at_usa.net> wrote in message news:80GdnRI0pJ1vpWSjXTWc-w_at_speakeasy.net... [snip]
> Seems ok to me as long as an elegant shorthand for it can be defined. In
> fact, providing all the primitives and a sufficiently expressive grammar so
> that arbitrary shorthand's can be defined strikes me as being both elegant
> and practical. In which case, this criticism would be like dissing SQL
> because the results of the optimizer can generate inelegant and cryptic path
> expressions.
>
> Unfortunately, I'm not knowledgeable enough to know if such a grammar is
> feasible, so flame away if I'm talking rot. But ISTM that this could make
> for a highly interesting topic. I'm late to the party, so perhaps it's
> already been discussed to death?

It's not been discussed at all to my knowdge, but I agree that it is a highly interesting topic.

My take is that shorthands could be an element of 'meta-programming' - i.e. programs that generate programs, and that a meta-language for relational databases would be very nice.

http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/sheard00accomplishments.html

Regards
Paul Vernon
Business Intelligence, IBM Global Services Received on Wed Jun 25 2003 - 11:31:34 CEST