Re: Is relational theory irrelevant? (was Re: Dreaming About Redesigning SQL)

"Mikito Harakiri" <mikharakiri_at_yahoo.com> wrote in message news:bdf69bdf.0311091120.14065bc5_at_posting.google.com...
> brennie_at_dcsi.net.au (Bruce) wrote in message
news:<64ea97cf.0311090213.38942cc_at_posting.google.com>...
> > There is an example in this news group from some time ago, where
> > someone used the D4 language (based on Date and Darwen, by Alphora in
> > their Dataphor product) to build a query directly from the user
> > requested query. It was beautiful, <....>
> > The SQL formulation, I believe, would be considerably longer
> > and much obtuse. If I recall correctly, it arose out of an argument
> > over whether SQL was/wasn't truly relational. A one page formaulation
> > including the design of the database.
>
> The reference, please. I find it hard to believe that differences in
> NULL treatment and Multiset Semantics can result in considerable gap
> in expressibility betwen Relational Algebra/D4 and SQL. (What else can
> be the source of D4 superiority?). SQL had grown to embrace every
> feature in the world, so that I would think that it's easy to make the
> opposite case where 2 line SQL query with analytical extensions would
> be translated into a page of D4 code. It might be that the ANSII
> comittee and vendors didn't really gave much thought to certain SQL
> features, and language orthogonality was certainly not their priority,
> but we can't say that SQL lacks expressibility.

Express a quota query. Received on Sun Nov 09 2003 - 23:55:08 CET