Re: Dreaming About Redesigning SQL

>>>>> "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 papers
Christopher> on whatever topics can attract research 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.

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.

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

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.

--
Pip-pip
Sailesh
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~sailesh