Re: OT Bull-fight avoidance

Marshall wrote:
> Bob Badour wrote:
>

>>Alfredo Novoa wrote:
>>
>>>Keith wrote:
>>>
>>>>The performance advantages of size constraints is
>>>>fundamental.
>>>
>>>Only with lazy implementations.
>>
>>Alfredo, the performance advantages of size constraints are fundamental
>>regardless--as are the performance disadvantages.

Indeed. However, this thread originated when one of the self-aggrandizing ignorants asked a loaded question positing an attribute with no logical maximum length and presupposing that all RDBMS products force one to specify a non-existent constraint for physical reasons.

While the presupposition is false, I assumed we were still talking about attributes without such an integrity constraint.

In practice, such unconstrained attributes are extremely rare. A paragraph type for a document would have no logical maximum.

> The performance value doesn't seem so great to me. The one
> circumstance in which it would seem more than trivial would be
> where the dbms could store a varchar inline with the rest of
> the fields, vs. in a separate heap. (But I know virtually nothing
> about database internals, so I could be way off.) That seems
> like it would be a significant win.

The performance value isn't all that great. Neither is the incremental cost of implementation for the DBMS vendor.

Dawn is just an idiot who is trying to manufacture some semblance controversy to make herself look more important than she really is.

[snip]

> Another, unrelated point that hasn't been mentioned so far
> (although I might have missed it; thread fatigue setting in...)
> is that in fact, a variety of non-mandatory performance tuning
> options is an indicator of technical *maturity* of a product, and
> we might well ask why another product or family of products
> *didn't* have such.

The issue of physical independence has been brought up. Part of the self-aggrandizing ignorant's fallacy was to deny a feature for physical independence that in fact already exists thereby denying the maturity. Received on Mon May 29 2006 - 20:28:51 CEST