> Jay A. Kreibich wrote: >> On Tue, Nov 03, 2009 at 02:51:23AM -0800, CityDev scratched on the wall: >>> That just seems so contrary to the original idea of the relational >>> model that you shouldn't have any data whose meaning is not defined >>> by data (in the case of an array you need to understand the >>> significance of relative position - remember relations have no row >>> or column order to stop you playing that game). > > So what is a character string then? An *ordered* sequence of characters. And > yet this coexists just fine with the relational model. An "array" is just a > generalization of this concept.
Except that the characters in a string lose all meaning when used individually. Arrays on the other hand, while ordered, generally hold sequences of data such that each element has substantial meaning individually, and may need to be queried against. In fact, even storing strings tends to cause problems, because often people want to query only a slice of a string and this often requires a full table scan. If you absolutely must store arrays, you can do this by storing them in blobs. If you need to query against the array elements, use a custom function (though, if you need to query against the elements in the array, you should REALLY be using a relational table.) As far as order goes, it is reasonably easy to order the rows using a field for that purpose. John _______________________________________________ sqlite-users mailing list sqlite-users@sqlite.org http://sqlite.org:8080/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sqlite-users
