Re: Dreaming About Redesigning SQL

sailesh(at)cs(dot)berkeley(dot)edu (Sailesh Krishnamurthy) writes:
>>>>>> "Christopher" == Christopher Browne <cbbrowne(at)acm(dot)org> writes:
> Christopher> Ah, but do "papers" honestly indicate the emergence
> Christopher> of some underlying theoretical model for which
> Christopher> fidelity could be evaluated?
>
> Certainly. The model is that of semi-structured data, where often
> times schema isn't very clearly defined. It's a different model from
> the relational model - which I'm partial to. There are situations
> where the XML model does make sense.
>
> Christopher> Or merely that academics are looking to write
> Christopher> papers on whatever topics can attract research
> Christopher> funding?
>
> Bash academics if you want. The truth is that industry is also
> working on it.
>
> As I said before, I have no axe to grind in this. I might be in
> academia now, but frankly I couldn't give a toss about XML.

Fifteen years ago, there were _vital_ things going on in academia;
Stonebraker's group was assortedly working on Postgres, Ingres, and
Cohera. _Real_ OS research was going on, with active work on such
systems as Sprite, BSD, Mach, with _many_ schools building their own
OS kernels to explore different edges.

The problem is that with the dearth of funding for "basic research,"
academia seems to be getting used as a partly-government-funded
"development" area for the developments that industry hopes might work
but where they would rather evade responsibility for the failures.

> Christopher> Half the articles in SIGOS have been about pretend
> Christopher> applications of Java to operating systems; why does
> Christopher> it seem likely that the "database academics" are any
> Christopher> less affected by this?
>
> I think you are looking at the wrong publishing location :-) The
> premier venue for the OS community are the SOSP and OSDI
> conferences. Please look at the SOSP04 papers - you'll find fairly
> good systems work.

When the first paragraph of the annual report contains the phrase

... despite the "operating systems" in our name ...

I can't see this boding well for the area of "operating systems
research" being particularly vital. They have had to expand it to
some notion of "systems" that is sufficiently wide open that I'm not
sure what it _wouldn't_ admit as "relevant."

> BTW, I'm not sure which database papers you read - the premeer
> venues for database systems work are the SIGMOD and VLDB
> conferences.

I haven't been subscribing to anything for a couple years now, TODS
having pretty much fallen into irrelevance. I suppose I need to look
to see if there is something worth following again.

> Christopher> CODASYL had a query system, albeit something that
> Christopher> looked more like assembly language than anything
>
> Please take a fair look at the XQuery data model and the XQuery
> language before comparing it with CODASYL. I will not admit (at
> least in public :-) to being a big fan of XQuery but that is because
> of certain details, not anything fundamental.

I have used it a bit for extracting data out of SOAP requests; I
wasn't terribly impressed with it, finding that with the way it was
remapping data, I would commonly have to code my own "tree walker" to
do things _right_.

It's not hard to do; when I had to modify my Galeon "bookmark walker"
a few months ago when they changed from a custom XML form to RDF, I
was pleasantly surprised to find that most of the changes involved
changing names of tags in DEFCONSTANT declarations. (Guess the
language :-).) Of course, "web bookmark" systems are likely to be
structured similarly, so that this change would be easy shouldn't be
much of a surprise.

But when you need to write code, that indicates that there is some
weakness to the model...
--
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Christopher Browne
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