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Archives of the TeradataForum
Message Posted: Thu, 18 Jul 2002 @ 13:53:22 GMT
| Subj: | | Re: The Optimizer and Multi Inlists |
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| 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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