Re: Interesting article: In the Beginning: An RDBMS history

"dawn" <dawnwolthuis_at_gmail.com> wrote in message news:1144419981.914579.164420_at_g10g2000cwb.googlegroups.com...
> Yes, when doing set operations on an ordered set of attributes,
> everything is handled as if the ordering were not there. So, the
> ordering is irrelevant to SQL, but employed by other languages working
> with the data. I don't know that it is ideal to have this, but it
> doesn't seem to be a problem to model the stored data as actual
> relations (with attributes ordered) either. --dawn

SQL is by no means ideal when it comes to whether ordering is implicit in the language.

Consider the following:

INSERT INTO fubar (blech, zork, zonk)
SELECT bimbo as zonk, jimbo as blech, zimbo as zork from xyzzy;

Anyone would think that zonk would go into zonk, blech would go into blech, and zork would go into zork.

Ahh but no! (At least not in the SQL diealects I am used to). The matchup is by position.
The same for

INSERT INTO fubar (blech, zork, zonk)
VALUES ( 'A', 'B', 'C'); Received on Fri Apr 07 2006 - 21:46:58 CEST