I think one of the main problems with SQL is that the concept of tuple should be more "up front".
What do I mean by that? Well, a table is a tuple of tuples, surely you could have a tuple of tuple of tuples, and you should be able to slice any of those (SELECT is a kind of slicing operation with a lot of features removed). SQL SELECT is kind of dumb that way. In general, I think that the above kinds of problem comes from an attitude that informed the original "design" (if you can call it that) of SQL - "users are far too stupid to ever understand this relational model thing properly, we have to dumb it down for them". The SQL UPDATE statement is so frustrating, WHY !@)(*#&!@(#*$&[EMAIL PROTECTED] does it not permit a table join!!! And don't give me that correlated subquery nonsense. Maybe you could blame this on implementations, but I have to say that any time I'm faced with doing a correlated subquery in any database system I've ever used, I fear it's going to be way slower than stooging around with temporary tables, and I don't think I've ever been wrong about that. Mind you I've only been using SQL since 1984. Again, maybe this is an implementation issue, but extensions are hard to do. For instance, the whole PostGIS thing and that geometry_columns and spatial_ref_sys tables really ought to be system tables, and wouldn't it be nice when you CREATed a table containing geometry if there was something that would note this automagically and put corresponding info in the (system) geometry_columns table. Not to mention a DROP TABLE statement that could be customized to unhook the geometry info... Why is there not a standard for stored procedures to which database software designers adhere? Same question for triggers. There are also some problems that are really hard to do in SQL; usually when I only need to solve them once in awhile, I suck the data out into awk or Python and do it in relational memory. I'll stop here. Webb Sprague wrote: >> Date compares SQL to Cobol. I >> disklike SQL a lot, but that seems a bit extreme to me, maybe it's the >> FORTRAN? >> > > I actually don't understand why people dislike SQL, though I can > understand that there are theoretical problems with it.... I know I > am supposed to dislike it too, so I am a bit bashful here... > > -W > _______________________________________________ > postgis-users mailing list > [email protected] > http://postgis.refractions.net/mailman/listinfo/postgis-users > -- Regards, Chris Hermansen · mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] tel:+1.604.714.2878 · fax:+1.604.733.0631 Timberline Natural Resource Group · http://www.timberline.ca 401 · 958 West 8th Avenue · Vancouver BC · Canada · V5Z 1E5 C'est ma façon de parler. _______________________________________________ postgis-users mailing list [email protected] http://postgis.refractions.net/mailman/listinfo/postgis-users
