Re: Is relational theory irrelevant?

"Serge Rielau" <srielau_at_ca.eye-bee-m.com> wrote in message news:bpfnq8$csd$1_at_hanover.torolab.ibm.com...
> Very good points.
> In development we call this "syntactic sugar". As a developer I'm
> responsible to implement orthogonality (i.e. supply RANK() OVER()),
> howvere, said education gap ,plus the complexity coming out of the
> optimizer strongly encourages "shorthands" for the most common
constraucts.
>
> Let me defend my position :-)
> In the latest version of DB2 we increased orthogonality by allowing
> INSERT, UPDATE and DELETE in the FROM clause. I.e. we declare these
> operators to return sets.

Are you suggesting that you can include a DELETE in the FROM clause of a SELECT? What set does the DELETE return? The set of deleted rows?

Can you then include a DELETE in the FROM clause of a view definition?

> One of our competitors took a different approach and allows
> "multi-table-insert" to address a specific customer problem.
> Multi-table insert is shorter to type, but less powerful.
> It will be interesting to see when customers force us to pull even with
> that competitor despite us having equivalent functionality.

No doubt. That's the cost of taking market share from a competitor. Received on Wed Nov 19 2003 - 06:48:36 CST