[xquery-talk] asterixdb

[daniela florescu]

No, Pavel, by no means, NO.

While N1Ql is finally something relatively well defined, and MUCH better then the alternatives, 
in terms of expressive power, we go back to 1993.

N1QL is 99% a copy of OQL designed by Sophie Cluet in 1993 for object-oriented databases, which had
nested objects and arrays, and 

After you got used to program in XQuery, going back to N1QL is going back to the cave age.

I personally won’t, and I would rather go did cow’s dung (time to review the classics https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs> :-)

Here are a couple of things (random things that come to my mind in 3 seconds…..):

1. Compositionality. It’s 2015 , not 1977, for God’s sake.

2. Casts, explicit and implicit casts. Absolutely necessary for processing data of unknown structure.

3. If-then-elses.  Absolutely necessary for processing data of unknown structure.

4. try-catch.  Absolutely necessary for processing data of unknown structure.

5. Object and array constructors with dynamically computed content.  It's 2015, not 1977 for God’s sake.

5. Functions and especially recursive functions. Absolutely necessary for processing data of unknown structure.

6. Declarative updates. No comment.

7. Full text. Again, it 2015, not 1977 for God’s sake.

=========

N1Ql is a cute little thing that brings us back in 1993…..:(


depressed.

Go back digging cow’s dung (or fashion in my case..)  while people are still so ignorant in terms of data processing ……

Wake me up when it’s done.

Dana



> On Oct 10, 2015, at 4:41 AM, Pavel Velikhov <pavel.velikhov at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> N1QL seems to have all the features to support a JSONiq front-end. Seems like a simple translation, except for the group-by clause.
> I guess if people like 4-valued logic, breaking up constructors into group by and select clauses - let them have it :)
> 
>> On 10 Oct 2015, at 13:03, daniela florescu <dflorescu at me.com <mailto:dflorescu at me.com>> wrote:
>> 
>> Andy,
>> 
>> The story is more complicated here.
>> 
>> The professor at Irvine Univ. in charge of the students team who designed AsterixDB, Mike Carey, is 
>> today the Chief Architect of CouchDB, who ships the N1QL that I just sent yesterday.
>> 
>> Mike Carey knows exactly XQuery, given that he was in charge of my XQuery processor at BEA Systems after I left.
>> 
>> So it’s definitely not by lack of knowledge that he went BACKWARDS and N1QL is even more primitive then SQL 92
>> (just added some primitive forms of path expressions to it..)
>> 
>> It’s probably market pressure…. 
>> 
>> IT HAS TO LOOK LIKE SQL, AND IT HAS TO USE THE THREE MAGIC KEYWORDS “select” “from” AND “where”.
>> 
>> 
>> Other then that, who cares that from a data processing perspective, we go backwards where we were in 1994 !???
>> (and nested select-from-where in the from clause are considered “disruptive” ..huh..)
>> 
>> Depressing. 
>> 
>> Are users so ignorant and they prefer a vanilla syntax that they know over significant expressive power  ?
>> 
>>  I wonder.
>> 
>> Dana
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>>> On Oct 9, 2015, at 3:31 PM, Andy Bunce <bunce.andy at gmail.com <mailto:bunce.andy at gmail.com>> wrote:
>>> 
>>> Hi,
>>> 
>>> Not tried it myself but, AsterixDB [1] may be of interest to XQuery users.
>>> 
>>> >The heart of AQL[2] is the FLWOR (for-let-where-orderby-return) expression. The roots of this expression were borrowed from the expression of the same name in XQuery.
>>> 
>>> and
>>> 
>>> >but XQuery was co-designed by a diverse band of experienced language designers (SQL, functional programming,and XML experts) 
>>> >and we wanted to avoid revisiting many of the same issues [3]
>>> 
>>> Regards
>>> /Andy
>>> 
>>> [1] https://asterixdb.ics.uci.edu/ <https://asterixdb.ics.uci.edu/>
>>> [2] https://asterixdb.ics.uci.edu/documentation/aql/manual.html <https://asterixdb.ics.uci.edu/documentation/aql/manual.html>
>>> [3] http://www.vldb.org/pvldb/vol7/p1905-alsubaiee.pdf <http://www.vldb.org/pvldb/vol7/p1905-alsubaiee.pdf>
>>> 
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> 
> С уважением,
> Павел Велихов
> pavel.velikhov at gmail.com <mailto:pavel.velikhov at gmail.com>

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