Re: Is relational theory irrelevant?

"Serge Rielau" <srielau_at_ca.eye-bee-m.com> wrote in message news:bpc4ci$ogk$1_at_hanover.torolab.ibm.com...
> Intersting thread you folks have goin here, hope you accept late arrivals.
> Some thoughts of mine:
> The correct SQL way to write the quota is:
>
> SELECT * FROM EMP ORDER BY SAL FETCH FIRST 5 ROWS ONLY
FIRST, LAST? How about MIDDLE?
ONLY? EXCLUSIVELY? Once again, analytic window functions solve this problem naturally with minimum extra concepts. I know, our beloved american users lack mathematical comprehension skills to handle predicate expressions confidently, so you have to invent words instead of predicates.

> Ragarding c) the realtional model is built for semantic beauty. Semantic
> beauty does not make for a fast web-experience. Pipelining however does.
> So a lot of effort is being made to pipeline SQL. Often the rules of the
> relational model are bent to get there.
> Example:
> SELECT * FROM (SELECT sendmail() FROM T) AS X WHERE c1 > 100;
> How many emails shall be send? Correct (IMHO) would be: As many emails
> as there are rows in T. In reality many DBMS will push the predicate
> through to T for the sake of speed, and most customers evidently don't
care.

Doesn't sendmail() imply an argument -- email address?

Next, what is the fact that you describe in your query? That's a set of folks that you want to target with your mail campain, right? Therefore, your query fetches the result set of target emails, and your client program opens the cursor and iterates through it and invokes sendmail at each step. Where is the problem? Received on Tue Nov 18 2003 - 18:03:14 CET