Hello,
You may be interested to know that, for the first time in my life, my work has
been referenced in a published dead-tree book. And one written by prominent
people in the industry too.
http://www.trafford.com/Bookstore/BookDetail.aspx?BookId=SKU-000177853
The new book "Database Explorations" (Trafford), by Chris J Date and Hugh
Darwen, has a few consecutive chapters where each discusses a different approach
to representing missing information in a relational database (ostensibly what
SQL NULL / nullability is for).
Chapter 26, "An Approach Using Relation Valued Attributes" (pp445-455),
discusses the canonical way that Muldis D does this, which is using a nested set
of exactly 0..1 elements (named "Maybe" after Haskell), where zero elements
means missing and one element means not missing, where that element is the value
itself. This design also directly corresponds to what you have when you do an
outer join with nesting, which is a large reason why I chose to do it that way.
Chapter 26 mentions by name Muldis D (language), Muldis Rosetta (reference
implementation), and my personal name, these which I discovered by way of the
glossary. I have yet to discover whether any other parts of the book have mentions.
I feel honored that this has happened. And its another degree of reputation.
The publication date is 2010 July, but I mention this today because today is
when I received my copy, and discovered the references.
-- Darren Duncan
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