Re: Call for an API standard for SQL statements

From: Marshall Spight <mspight_at_dnai.com>
Date: Mon, 25 Oct 2004 05:18:38 GMT
Message-ID: <O00fd.2778$R05.1389_at_attbi_s53>


"Fredrik Bertilsson" <fredrik_bertilsson_at_passagen.se> wrote in message news:31f7e57d.0410242036.8c3962a_at_posting.google.com...
> "Marshall Spight" <mspight_at_dnai.com> wrote:
> > When you say "two dimensional", you mean the result has many
> > rows and two columns, right?
> I don't know if you are kidding or if you really don't know the
> definition of "dimension". A two-dimensional result is a result with
> many rows and *many* columns.

I was being serious, but mostly I was just being pedantic. It was a bit juvenile of me, I admit.

In fact, my definition of dimension is the most technically correct, since the dimensionality of a relation is the number of attributes. Consider a set of (x,y,z) points: you could record these in a table of three attributes, x, y, and z. But you wouldn't call this two dimensional data, even if a printout of "select * from points" show up as a grid. This data is three dimensional, because each dimension of each row/element varies independently.

Marshall Received on Mon Oct 25 2004 - 07:18:38 CEST

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