Re: Is Ingres yet relational?

In article <bcb8c360.0406020907.635f2818_at_posting.google.com>, Tony Douglas says...
>
>Paul Mason <Paul_member_at_newsguy.com> wrote in message
>news:<c94b9l01ll4_at_drn.newsguy.com>...
>
>> Well all I can say is that anyone who finds the C required for UDTs difficult
>> probably doesn't want to go hacking the Ingres source itself ;)
>>
>
>And all I can say is that there is no way the amount of grubbing about
>that's required to do something as fundamental as define your own,
>appropriate, data types in Ingres is acceptable. The data type of an
>attribute is the most basic constraint that can be applied, and it
>should be utterly straightforward to define the most appropriate types
>for the organisation being modelled. Pfaffing about with C does not
>count as straightforward.
>

I agree it should be easier. The fact that it's not is, I suspect, the result of a chicken-and-egg situation where not enough people use UDTs to request changes and UDTs have not been perceived as easy enough for many people to try to use them.

My semi-tongue-in-cheek remark (you'll note the smiley) was in part to point out that they're not as hard to implement as many people suppose.

>Delving about in the guts of a DBMS server is an entirely different
>matter.
>

Yes and no. Because the code you write for UDTs is in effect put into the 'guts of the DBMS' - alongside the code to deal with built-in complex data-types (i.e. non-machine types) such as date, decimal etc.

Look, I'm not suggesting that the current situation with Ingres UDTs is ideal but I just found it amusing that in the same thread where people are blithely talking about stripping SQL out of Ingres, we also have people balking at some much more straightforward coding. I realise these aren't necessarily the same people - but nonetheless it tickled me - hence the comment and the smiley. Received on Thu Jun 03 2004 - 10:32:20 CEST