On Apr 13, 2006, at 6:28 AM, Kevin Toppenberg wrote:
My knowledge of SQL is extremely limited, so bear with me... My understanding of SQL is that one describes the results one wants. e.g. (SEX=MALE,AGE>35,LNAME=SMITH) and then a set of results is returned. Now, Bhaskar has written that there is a commercial product that allows access to GT.M globals through a SQL interface--although it bypasses all of Fileman's triggers, cross-references etc.
That's right. In the jargon, SQL is declarative but not procedural. Unfortunately, there is a relatively straightforward translation to what is called relational algebra, giving a prescription (albeit not one that is necessarily very efficient) for carrying out a given query. In practice, you may find these "brute force" searches used more often than they should.
But I wonder how the searching aspect of this all works. Does SQL require the use of pre-created indexes?
It should. How effectively they are used probably varies from product to product. But, in any case, there is a reason why you find books with titles like "SQL Performance Tuning". Often, queries end up being expressed in awkward or unnatural ways because the RDBMS doesn't do a particularly good job of optimization.
FIND^DIC seems to be only able to search for stuff when a pre-created cross reference exists.
Pretty much.
Wouldn't it be nice to have the ability to do descriptive searches in Fileman? It CAN be done interactively via Fileman Search, but it can't be done programatically. (Actually it wouldn't take much create an API to fill in the search criteria in a TEMPLATE which could then be used to do what I am desribing).
I agree. This is something that really needs to be added to Fileman.
Kevin
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