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Message Posted: Thu, 18 Jul 2002 @ 13:53:22 GMT


     
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Subj:   Re: The Optimizer and Multi Inlists
 
From:   Mark Landry

  But I think your query alerts us to a deficiency in SQL. You can specify a single literal value or a list of values (corresponding to a column), but you cannot specify a list of values arranged in rows and columns. Since SQL is specifically meant for dealing with tables, this is a huge oversight. Wouldn't it be nice if you could write your query thus?  



Your comments echo SQL criticism by E.F. Codd in a 1988 Datamation article, "Fatal Flaws in SQL":

"[Consider] the query:
    select enr, ecity, estate from employee where (ecity, estate)
    in select (wcity, wstate) from warehouse"

"[SQL] refuses to handle this query ... To a user this seems totally inappropriate behavior ..." He goes on to say that concatenating city and state to form a working query is "neither a general nor a natural solution to the problem."

And this was years before SQL-92's flurry of enhancements yet it wasn't included.



     
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