Re: Nested sets in SQL - inventor?

"Marshall Spight" <marshall.spight_at_gmail.com> wrote in message news:1122529011.244856.250850_at_g43g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...

> I'm still trying to wrap my head around recursive queries; they
> are a fairly new thing to think about, and I don't have a good
> model for how they are implemented. The 'recursive with' mentioned
> recently makes me think it's going to build the whole recursively
> defined set in advance of the select, but I expect that's probably
> not right.

Take advantage of this moment of ignorance. It won't come again. Once you wrap your head around the "how" your vision of the "what" will be more cloudy than it is now.

One of the consistent failures we all make is to deal with the "what rather than how".

Once you have a workable model of how recursive joins are implemented, that model will begin
to displace the model you now have of what recursive joins really are.

This has happened to me several times in my long career. It begin to think of the "what" stated in a program
as being shorthand for the "how" that I or a code generator might use to carry it out. It's an illusion, albeit a useful one. Received on Thu Jul 28 2005 - 14:49:20 CEST