On 05/01/2009, at 10:13 PM, Robert Dionne wrote:
In the early days of DB2, queries that were know to be slow were
called ad-hoc and strictly verboten in production code. I can see
where people my want to keep these, even knowing they are slow.
Perhaps _ad_hoc_view would bring provide this caution, without
calling them "slow". As was mentioned, they are all slow the first
time.
Using a more subtle name for something will only work for english
speakers. Everyone else will rely on the documentation. So the
documentation had better explain this issue very clearly, and hence
the name doesn't really matter.
On the one hand, it doesn't really matter what it's called, although
given that it will be in english it may as well mean something in
english. However I do thing the the underlying reality is that the
view is created only for the duration of the call - modulo the server
keeping it around just in case :), and this is the key differentiator
from permanent views. Temporary is the word that most clearly
describes that characteristic. And while ad-hoc might be the opposite
of 'designed', IMO the use of _design is really a substitute for
_view_definition, rather than describing a characteristic of the thing
e.g. 'this is a designed, not ad-hoc thing'. Or maybe, just maybe, I'm
overthinking this issue?
Antony Blakey
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