I do agree with a lot of this *however* and as we all pretty much know, many of the ANSI SQL items have been made standard after certain RDBMS vendors pushed for them to become a standard...It's great to be innovative and come up with enhanced features and syntaxes as long as IMHO _if_ 1) it is obvious and makes sense to invent and propose them and there is no existing standard, 2) there is an actual follow-up and representation at some ANSI committee...Basically, if one decides to come up with a new syntax or important enhancement to the SQL world, then it better makes sense and be proposed (follow-up) for ANSI acceptance...
If you look back at how "stored procedure" and "trigger" made it to ANSI specs amongst other additions, I'm glad the innovative RDBMS vendor(s) came up with these items in the first place ;) - sure enough and eventhough there is now some ANSI standard based stored procedure and trigger, existing RDBMS vendors will continue to support their current extensions (i.e. T-SQL, PL/SQL) - not just because they have to be backward compatible with the existing customer base but also because the extensions are (currently) richer than the ANSI standard base... It is important to respect the existing and defined standards - We need to make the extra effort to support and reinforce standards compliance in Derby as Rick mentioned - completely agree with this - this is the absolute minimum IMO. Now providing extensions on top of the standard (base) is something that also makes a database attractive... ;) but if you want portable code, then use the least common denominator which is ANSI SQL and other official standards... I recall hearing about ANSI SQL compliance tests being available somewhere...not sure where this stands...JDBC used to have some as well.. --francois
