[Mulgara-dev] iTQL features

[Paul Gearon]

A conversation with Andrae has him disagreeing.

He's fine with the feature, but not with the iTQL syntax.  I'll let him
write the details of his own opinion, but in essence he believes that
insert-select is a hack.  It is entirely for this construction that
duplicates of variables in a select clause are allowed.  It is also the
reason for permitting constants in the select clause.

Extending "select" in this way, entirely so it can be used for
"insert-select" is not a good reason to go tainting processing the standard
"select" query.  He would rather see a SPARQL-esque "insert-construct".

This approach makes sense to me, with one caveat.  iTQL was designed to look
as SQL-like as possible.  "Insert-select" came about because of that
approach.  This will be moving away from that explicit design decision.

Fortunately the change is not that difficult, and only significantly affects
the syntax.  The change to processing would be minor.  Whatever people
think, it will only get changed by someone who cares about it enough.  For
the moment, the only person I know of who really wants this syntax change is
Andrae, and I know that he's too busy working on transactions to make it
happen.  :-)

Paul

On 11/2/06, David Wood <dwood at softwarememetics.com> wrote:
>
> +1
>
> Regards,
> Dave
>
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