David Fetter wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 13, 2006 at 12:51:57PM -0400, Merlin Moncure wrote:
>> On 6/13/06, David Fetter <david@fetter.org> wrote:
>>>> SQL was a quick and dirty hack...
>
> If there are better alternatives, they will need to show some
> real-world attributes, not mathematically-inspired fantasies, because
> they're not "better" unless actual people in real-world situations can
> use them.... that you can point to in real-world software that's
> actually deployed, please show it.
KDB [1] from KX Systems has both terse mathematical notations
to access data directly as well as an awkwardly(?) extended
SQL syntax to handle queries not easily handled by SQL alone.
Time-series related queries are one such case [2,3].
Examples can be seen various places on the web [3].
It has plenty of real-world usage on large databases at places
including Deutsche Bank, Fidelity Investments, JP Morgan,
Merrill Lynch, the US Army, etc.
>> the terse mathematical notation commonly used...
>
> Again, if you have a piece of software you can point to that does this
> thing, please do so.
I seriously doubt it follows Date or Pascal religiously, but
it does have a convenient and very terse mathematical notation
so might count as a real-world piece of software that you were
asking for.
[1] http://www.kx.com/news/press-releases/arthur-interview.php
[2] http://www.kx.com/news/in-the-news/sql-timeseries.php
[3] http://www.intelligententerprise.com/010327/celko_online.jhtml;jsessionid=NDIHEWXGL4TNKQSNDBNSKHSCJUMEKJVN
[4] http://www.cs.nyu.edu/courses/fall02/G22.3033-007/kintro.html