Simon Slavin wrote: > The thing I always found interesting about SQL was that it picks three > English words, INSERT, DELETE, UPDATE, and says that that's all you need to > do. And it's right ! Is there something special about the 'three-ness' of > database operations ? Or are you meant to think of it as two writing > operations (INSERT, DELETE) and a convenience operation which combines them > (UPDATE) ? If there was another word, what would it be ? REPLACE ? > DUPLICATE ?
LDAP/X.500 has Add/Delete/Modify as well. (It also has Rename, which doesn't really make sense for a tabular data store, but is useful for a hierarchical data structure.) > Also, why is there only one English word needed for reading operations ? > What would a database language look like if it has more than one word ? > Would there be a difference between FIND and SCAN ? X.500 has three separate operations Read, List, and Search. (Read = retrieve contents of a single entry, List = list the names of the immediate children of an entry, Search = search for any entries matching a filter.) LDAP combined all of these functions into a single Search operation. It's often considered to be a mistake on the part of the LDAP designers. -- -- Howard Chu CTO, Symas Corp. http://www.symas.com Director, Highland Sun http://highlandsun.com/hyc/ Chief Architect, OpenLDAP http://www.openldap.org/project/
