Re: native xml processing vs what Postgres and Oracle offer

rpost wrote:
...
>
> To which he replied: but a forum message is often a reply, and in that case,
> a reply to a specific other message; this is not a presentation feature
> but a basic structural property of his forum (and of USENET as well);

For all we know, the OP's forum could be some idiosyncratic mutant, eg., one-user-at-a-time and synchronous. I'd say it would be more useful to consider USENET. Regarding whatever a "basic structural property" is, to be more accurate, the basic structure of USENET is a message. As far as USENET is concerned, a message isn't complete when a user submits it, it is complete when some server has massaged the user message and introduced various "headers" to it. Those headers are the relevant "basic structural property" (attributes, to use Codd's lingo).

> not just of the implementation but at the functional requirement level.
> You seemed to be flat-out denying this, which raised the question:
> how would *you* model USENET or his forum?
> ...

I'm not denying any such thing. As far as how I would model USENET goes, first, I'd list my "functional requirements" and single out the ones that are expressible in terms of formal constraints, as well as apply the Information Principle and identify the attributes (properties if you like) that I wanted to record for each message, then form predicates and constraints that would admit whatever display presentation or presentations I desired.

I doubt if after that, there would remain any pertinent reason, ie., need, for the word "forum" other than as a label for the resulting application. Probably the constraints would have to counter various loopholes in the RFC's as well. Received on Mon Dec 01 2008 - 15:19:17 CET