Re: a union is always a join!

On Mar 22, 4:18 am, "Brian Selzer" <br..._at_selzer-software.com> wrote:
> I didn't make a typo.  I think that your characterization of insertions and
> deletions is incorrect.  There are things in the universe of discourse that
> can appear different at different times.  Twenty years ago I was fifty
> pounds lighter than I am now, but that doesn't mean that wasn't me.  Each
> thing that persists travels a path through time, interacting along the way
> with various other things, and thus identity for things that persist must
> take into account the entirety of those paths, not just what appears in
> arbitrary or even adjacent snapshots of the universe along the way;
> therefore what serves to identify something can be different at different
> times, and similarly, what serves to identify something at one time may
> serve to identify something else at a different time. Whenever an employee
> forgets his badge, he is issued one of five temporary badges, so more than
> one of those temporary badges could serve to identify the same employee at
> different times, and also each of those temporary badges could serve to
> identify several different employees at different times.  Consequently, one
> cannot logically conclude that whenever identifiers at different times are
> identical, the things that they identify are also identical, and therefore
> the fact that a particular tuple appears in successive states does not imply
> that the things referenced by the tuple at each state are identical.
> Clearly deletions and insertions are not just differences between states--at
> least not algebraic differences.  Once one admits that there are things in
> the universe of discourse that can appear different at different times, the
> semantics of insert, update and delete become clear: insert describes the
> beginning of the path that something travels through time, updates describe
> milestones along the path that mark changes in appearance, and delete
> describes the end of the path.  So a transition consisting of a delete and
> an insert that has no apparent effect on the database makes perfect sense
> because it describes the end of one thing and the beginning of another.

Ok, after tuple has been inserted into the table, did it get recorded in the database? If it was, then we have two distinct database states, and this insertion is visible to an observer (err, database user). If this insertion was not committed, but immediately rolled back, then no other transaction can possibly notice this change. For all practical purposes the insertion and deletion of the "same thing" is NOOP. Received on Mon Mar 23 2009 - 04:34:27 CET