On Wed, 7 Aug 2002, Don Baccus wrote:
> >>So again relational theory can solve the problem but at a cost in
> >>efficiency.
> >
> > If you're talking about theory, efficiency doesn't come into it.
>
> That's rather the point, isn't it?
>
> In the real world, it does.
Well, I think I dealt with this elsewhere in my post by showing
that I can always implement what you did with inheritance just as
efficiently using relational methods, and sometimes more efficiently.
> Because in fact you have advocated removing the OO stuff.
Actually, I'd suggested thinking about removing the OO stuff. Starting
a discussion about the concept is far from "advocating" it. And in fact
I'd backed off the idea of removing it. However, now that it appears to
me that table inheritance actually breaks the relational portion of the
database, I'm considering advocating its removal. (This requires more
discussion, of course.)
> Writing extra code, no matter how trivial, increases the odds that a
> mistake will be made.
Yeah. But using a broken table inheritance model is far more likely to
cause bugs and errors. It certainly did when I tried to figure out what
you were doing using inheritance. Not only did I get it wrong, but I'm
not at all convinced that what you were doing was what you really wanted
to do.
> You mean you accidently supported the argument that this approach is,
> perhaps, more error prone?
No, supported the argument that table inheritance is either
ill-defined, broken, or both.
> The argument I've made is that even though that you can model PG's OO
> features not just relationally but in real-live warts-and-all SQL92,
> that doesn't mean they're not useful.
All right. I disagree with that, too. I think that they are not
only not useful, but harmful.
> We don't need the binary "integer" type, either. We could just use
> "number". Yes, operations on "number" are a bit slower and they often
> take more space, but ...
>
> Shall we take a vote :)
If you like. I vote we keep the integer type. Any other questions?
cjs
--
Curt Sampson <cjs@cynic.net> +81 90 7737 2974 http://www.netbsd.org Don't you know, in this new Dark Age, we're
alllight. --XTC