Re: native xml processing vs what Postgres and Oracle offer

rpost wrote:
> paul c wrote:
>

>> patrick61z_at_yahoo.com wrote:

>>> Actually, usenet is often displayed as being hierarchical, for
>>> instance with so called "threaded" newsreaders, because within a list
>>> of discussions, replies to replies are often more comprehensible when
>>> you can follow the subthreads.
>>> ...
>> Nobody said there's anything wrong with hierarchical displays (or
>> hierarchical physical storage for that matter).

>> As the general level of literacy continues to decline more and more of
>> those who fail to recognize the possibility of a logical model will have
>> to put up with that dwindling breed.

What question would that be? (The original question was to do with the best product to use to display hierarchical data. The OP planned to invent his own forum, presumably not Usenet-based. I pointed out that he was wrong to assume a forum is hierarchical.)

> Does your logical model for USENET include message ids?
>

It's not always clear in this group what people mean by logical, whether they mean a formal logic or merely something that "makes sense" to them.

So I'm not sure what "message id" means here, whether you mean it in a general sense or to stand for what some rfc's call "message-id" or "msg id" (which seem to have a tarnished history). However if I were to make a model for Usenet, it would try to be logical, ie., it would follow logical principals, like relational algebra does, where, courtesy of closure, one can always choose to validate results by comparing extensions as opposed to re-evaluating a program that is full of navigation verbs.

If you are talking about keys, I would note the similarity with the RM and this from rfc 3977: "Each article MUST have a unique message-id; two articles offered by an NNTP server MUST NOT have the same message-id."

I don't want to disparage the original rfc authors as many of the rfc's date from the days when ignorance of data models was more innocent than today's willful arrogance but it looks to me as if some of them might have been confused about such a basic principle as keys, eg., in rfc 2822: "Though optional, every message SHOULD have a "Message-ID:" field." (Rfc 977 is pretty vague.) Without some key, one never knows precisely what fact one is stating. I suppose all the optional "fields" in the various rfc's might admit a kind of irregular notion of key where some articles or messages might use different sets of fields as keys. For sure, the rfc's I've seen are pre-occupied with syntax and other physical matters and the usual cursor operators of hierarchical stores, "Next" and so forth. Looks like they anticipated, in their own idiosyncratic way, the wild goose chase of the XML fans to find the mythical semantic web, ie., invent some pet syntax and blindly assume it can be a basis for fundamental transformations, ie., new information from a starting point that is as vacuous as the Emperor's New Clothes. Received on Wed Nov 26 2008 - 17:34:27 CET