On Sun, Jul 7, 2013 at 11:34 AM, Keith Medcalf <kmedc...@dessus.com> wrote:
> > Despite the long diatribes you have not indicated a single case in which > the set ordinal of the row would be of any use whatsoever. > > For 40 years we have gotten on without it, so yes, it is only for you > newbies that somehow think there is a use for it, and for 40 years no one > has ever come upon a real need to have set ordinals generated by the > database engine as part of the cursor processing (for various definitions > of database engine). > > Kind of makes you wonder what you might have overlooked or are assuming > incorrectly doesn't it? > > If you wish to posit that a row number function is not useful, that's fine. You don't have to like it or support its inclusion. To claim that there has not been a single case described where it would be of any use whatsoever clearly demonstrates that you have not bothered reading the messages you're replying to! The cases have been described, you simply disagree with them. There *is* utility in being able to have a row or rank number function. For example, lets say you are Billboard Magazine and you keep track of record sales. On a weekly basis you generate a list of the top 40 selling records. One of your customers wants that list in descending order. There are certainly ways you can accomplish this without a rank function, but a rank function can make the SQL clearer, easier to maintain. At my last job I used Microsoft SQL Server (as that was technology selected before I was hired) and used a rank number capability provided in T/SQL as part of a query to generate a list of files in a particular order. The order was important in my use case (prioritization of a set of files comprising multiple terabytes of data that needed to be synchronized, but where not all data was equally important). I didn't need to send all the sort criteria to each remote site, I just needed to ensure the order was maintained. Could I have done it in a different way? Yes. But as mentioned on multiple occasions, the idea of the rank or row number function is not that there is no other way to accomplish the task, it is about convenience. Now, you are free to dislike my approach to solving the problem. I'm sure there are better ways to accomplish what needed to be done. Regardless of that, what I did was convenient and got the job done. Had that capability not been available to me, I could have done it in another way. No one is arguing that there isn't another way to accomplish the stated task. Regardless of *ANY OF THE ABOVE*: How about exercising some common courtesy and not resort to denigration of another person's knowledge or apparent skills or lack thereof. You don't like the idea, fine. State why you don't like it and move on. Don't contribute any code that might address the idea. The rest? It is not useful. SDR _______________________________________________ sqlite-users mailing list sqlite-users@sqlite.org http://sqlite.org:8080/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sqlite-users
