[PLUG] Advanced Topics February meeting

Ted Kubaska tedkubaska at comcast.net
Fri Feb 15 21:04:03 UTC 2008


Sorry to bring this up again ... there's been so much back and forth.

The Advanced topics meeting is Wed at Jax, not Mon. Is this correct?
 -ted

-----Original Message-----
From: plug-bounces at lists.pdxlinux.org
[mailto:plug-bounces at lists.pdxlinux.org] On Behalf Of Rich Shepard
Sent: Thursday, February 14, 2008 12:26 PM
To: General Linux/UNIX discussion and help; civil and on-topic
Subject: Re: [PLUG] Advanced Topics February meeting

On Thu, 14 Feb 2008, John Jason Jordan wrote:

> One problem I have with SQL is that there seems to be a large variety
> of flavors of it, all of which are obsessed with having their commas,
> semicolons, periods, word order, etc. precisely the way they want it.
> Witness the multiple suggestions I received here for how to write a
> delete query.

   SQL is a language that works with sets. It is not procedural, functional,

or otherwise similar to general purpose programming languages. There is an
established standard for vendors to use in their SQL products, but they are
free to implement many of the standards as they see fit. What you see are
not SQL flavors, but vendor-specific implementation details of many/most SQL
capabilities.

> Then there is the problem that it requires logic. At the moment my
> logic module is pretty toasted from overexposure to linguistic syntax
> (algebra for linguists).

   Think sets: tables (called relations in the lingo), tuples (rows), and
attributes (columns). SQL queries return tables (sets).

   I highly recommend Rick van Laan's "Introduction to SQL, 4th Edition."
Not
only comprehensive, but very well written and, to my knowledge, the only
comprehensive discussion of date and time in SQL selects. Critical for most
business applications and not at all well supported by any RDBMS.

-- 
Richard B. Shepard, Ph.D.               |  Integrity            Credibility
Applied Ecosystem Services, Inc.        |            Innovation
<http://www.appl-ecosys.com>     Voice: 503-667-4517      Fax: 503-667-8863
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