Roger, I'm not thinking of you as a gatekeeper but as a member of the "vocal opposition". You did oppose my request, after all, you didn't simply ignore it. But your opposition was not unreasonable -- it was simply based on certain assumptions that I saw an opportunity to address.
Several things might be responsible for there being no "outpouring of support" for a raw reverse function. Probably the two most important are 1) it can be readily accomplished as a UDF, if you have access to the UDF mechanism; and 2) how many people are writing applications where "string ends-with" queries are just as important as "string begins-with" queries? Such queries are the bread-and-butter of some lexicographical or grammatical natural-language oriented applications. I would use the function to flip the raw codepoint order of text, storing the reversed version redundantly in a second column, so that ends-with queries would have access to an index (with GLOB): these queries would be restated as starts-with queries against the reversed-format column. The search-term would be flipped by the function too. ... where reversedColumn GLOB reverse( ? ) Or maybe even there will be "virtual columns" in SQLite so that there would be no need to store the reversed form redundantly in the base table. The second column would be defined as virtual, pointing at an actual column, but given a reversed collation, then indexed. That the SQL dev team has not responded I take as an indication that this would be very low priority for them, below the horizon of their attention, though I think the waters of the discussion may have been clouded by the issue of an intelligent reverse function which would keep multi-codepoint combining forms intact during the reversal process. I see no reason why the two functions could not simply coexist under different names. Oracle and SQLServer both have raw reverse functions now. Anyway, the lack of such a function is only a problem for me vis-a-vis an amalgamation distribution of SQLite. I may decide to forget about it as a target platform and rewrite the app as a web-service, where I would indeed have access to the UDF mechanism. But there was merit in having the application work in offline mode too. Regards Tim Romano Swarthmore PA On Tue, Jul 27, 2010 at 12:10 PM, Roger Binns <rog...@rogerbinns.com> wrote: > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- > Hash: SHA1 > > On 07/27/2010 07:07 AM, Tim Romano wrote: > > I will consider it progress if we could get beyond the two stock replies: > > "you should do that in your application" and "you could do that in an > > extension". > > You seem to think I am sort of gatekeeper of what goes into SQLite. I am > not. However I do try help - ie try to discern your goals and show how > they > can best be met given the architecture of SQLite and how the development > team is most likely to behave. Please feel free to ignore me. > > Also note: > > 1: There was no great outpouring of consensus that SQLite should be changed > > 2: The SQLite dev team have not responded at all > > Roger > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- > Version: GnuPG v1.4.10 (GNU/Linux) > Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ > > iEYEARECAAYFAkxPBQAACgkQmOOfHg372QTUSACeM5kPZRxHWONCXpP22EbXp7b0 > TDMAoNaEY+9HIohMvf2XIUwC5EucxYdt > =1BbC > -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- > _______________________________________________ > sqlite-users mailing list > sqlite-users@sqlite.org > http://sqlite.org:8080/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sqlite-users > _______________________________________________ sqlite-users mailing list sqlite-users@sqlite.org http://sqlite.org:8080/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sqlite-users
