[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: W3C's five new XQuery/Xpath2 working drafts - Still missi
> -----Original Message----- > From: Jonathan Robie [mailto:jonathan.robie@s...] > Sent: Friday, December 28, 2001 12:31 PM > To: Paul T; Champion, Mike; xml-dev@l... > Subject: Re: W3C's five new XQuery/Xpath2 working drafts - > Still missing Updates > > But I don't quite grasp your argument. Certainly we need to provide > validation for business rules, but shouldn't these business rules be > defined on top of well-typed data? I most certainly do NOT want a query to ignore purchase orders that have an extra <p> tag in the <description> element, whatever the putative PO schema says on the subject! > They certainly are in relational > databases. Do you think that RDBMS systems should simply stop using > datatypes? If not, why do you think that XQuery should? I'd appreciate some elaboration on the role of "types" in RDBMS systems, preferably from someone who actually uses them in their day job. My very limited experience in this area tends to support Dare and Paul's remarks about constraints: most "types" I've ever used are simply strings, dates, or integers; what matters are the primary - foreign key constraints (to ensure that joins are meaningful), or business rules that are much more practical to validate with procedural code. This discussion got me curious, so I checked out Date's INTRODUCTION TO DATABASE SYSTEMS to see what he says about the importance of types. He does spend about 15 pages (in the 1995 edition) discussing domains and types, but makes a couple of points I found intriguing: First, he implies that user-defined types are difficult to work with and rarely used except by experts. Also he (predictably) concludes "SQL supports almost none of the ideas presented here", referring the reader to a 1-page summary in a previous chapter on SQL's lamentable lack of support for Codd's ideas about domains (which Date equates with types). OK, Date is a bit of a crank about SQL, so let's see what others say... a quick Googling of the subject also left me with the impression that doing anything with SQL types other than distinguishing strings from dates from integers from floats from binary is an invitation for interoperability nightmares. So -- again, this is more or less a troll, in hopes that someone will educate me -- I get the impression that "types" as discussed in this thread are on the bleeding edge of RDBMS technology. I KNOW that types are the blood dripping off the bleeding edge of XML technology :~) I listened to too many of James Clark and Makoto Murata's analyses of the W3C XML Schema spec in Florida recently to have any illusions that it is the last word on the subject of XML schemas or datatypes. Now that ISO is taking on the job of standardizing Relax NG and Schematron as well as W3C XSD, the "it's the only standard we have, so we must support it" argument goes away. The W3C is most successful when the members butt heads, horse trade, abstract away insignificant differences, and come up with mutually agreeable ways of doing things that we all basically know how to do. It is least successful when it tries to do computer science by committee. XPath 2.0 is very much in the first category, and XQuery as XPath + constructors + updates would not push the boundaries of solid knowledge very far either. I just don't like the idea of holding up the standardization of well-understood techniques in order to explore terra incognita.
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