Re: Representing data on disk in an MV database - was Re: foundations of relational theory? - some references for the truly starving

Mikito Harakiri wrote:

> "Mike Preece" <michael_at_preece.net> wrote:
>>Apology not necessary. Thanks anyway - it's like a breath of fresh
>>air.
>>Char(255) = End of item mark
>>Char(254) = Attribute mark
>>Char(253) = Value mark
>>Char(252) = SubValue mark
> 
> Fresh air? Where did you dig that corpse from the 60s? Even XML (which
> smells a lot too) is more inventive with their field delimeters.

Dear Mikito,

I think you owe Mike an apology.

First of all, you are taking the quote about the apology out of context. A more accurate context would be:

Mike Preece wrote:
>Jonathan Leffler wrote:

>> Does that mean that all field values are stored as printable
>> character strings?

>> I've seen similar comments before, and always been puzzled by
>> them. It seems to be the only way to understand the use of a
>> fixed byte code as the value separator (sorry - I've forgotten
>> the correct MV terminology).

Mike's comment about an apology being unnecessary refers to my posting showing that I had forgotten the correct terms for the markers used by MV system to indicate the end of different parts of a record - and was (by implication, at any rate) too lazy to go and look them up. I really don't see why those two pieces of politeness need attacking with the comments about 'Fresh air?' and 'corpse'. I am sorry if you think that politeness and civilized discourse died in the 1960s and are no longer applicable in the current millennium. I have news for you; in some parts of the world, such niceties are still valued as a way of making it easier to communicate without unduly ruffling feathers.

Your comment that XML smells is somewhat apropos (there are likely to be few people who dissent too violently in these news groups). However, I'm not sure that it is beneficial to claim that it is better to use multi-byte field delimiters as in XML (which uses a minimum of 4 bytes for </X>) than to use one of a set of four single byte end markers.

Attacking purely factual information with invective is not the sign of healthy discussion!

If you want to discuss the wisdom of using those markers, you might ask how an MV database stores Turkish names which use the y-umlaut character, because that is coded as 0xFF or 255 in the ISO Latin-1 character set. And similarly for the other mark bytes. That advances the discussion constructively and makes use (rather than abuse) of the bandwidth - of both the Internet and the people reading this group.

Just pouring out bile is childish. If you can't be constructive, please go elsewhere and let those who would like to learn - or help others learn - concentrate on that without having to suffer from irrelevant, immature postings.

And no, you are not the only person who would benefit from a reminder about the basics of netiquette (nor, even, are you necessarily the worst offender - probably just one of the tersest). There are quite a few other people who should also shut up if they cannot contribute usefully.

-- 
Jonathan Leffler                   #include <disclaimer.h>
Email: jleffler_at_earthlink.net, jleffler_at_us.ibm.com
Guardian of DBD::Informix v2003.04 -- http://dbi.perl.org/