William Robertson wrote:
> DA Morgan wrote:
>
>>Daniel Fink wrote:
>>
>>>As soon as I saw DCL, I thought Digital Command Language! Recycling
>>>acronyms is a great way to confuse people!
>>>
>>>Ah, fond memories of VMS...
>>>
>>>Daniel Fink
>>
>>Someone could probably write a book on just the subject of Oracle
>>recycling names within a single product family.
>>
>>How many definitions for the word "block"?
>>
>>Three come to mind immediately.
>>--
>>Daniel A. Morgan
>>http://www.psoug.org
>>damorgan_at_x.washington.edu
>>(replace x with u to respond)
>
>
> I always liked the way Oracle tried to claim that "JSP" stood for "Java
> Stored Procedures".
>
> It seems to me that one difference between DDL and metadata is in
> intentionality. When creating a partitioned table, for example, you
> might deliberately not define individual storage clauses or tablespace
> names for individual partitions, because you want them all to use the
> settings defined at the table level. When reverse-engineering the DDL
> from the data dictionary later, there is nothing to tell you that the
> person who created the table had that in mind, so typically tools such
> as exp/imp specify every setting for each partition. The result is
> semantically different to what was used originally, even if it produces
> the same result, but there is no way to tell that from the metadata.
>
> I don't think that helps the OP very much but I do enjoy a bit of
> semantics.
>
Well, I hang my hat on the word data definition LANGUAGE.
Metadata is not a language. CREATE TABLE... now there's a verb and a
subject followed by many, many, adjectives which pay our bills... all
this in imperative form.
Metadata just sits there twiddling its thumbs...
Cheers
Serge
--
Serge Rielau
DB2 SQL Compiler Development
IBM Toronto Lab
Received on Mon Sep 19 2005 - 06:51:50 CDT
