Re: Post to hacker list

On Sat, 20 Mar 2004, Tino Wildenhain wrote:

> This would be great!
> Maybe we could get some donations if only we know what needs to be done.
> Hope soneone will answer.

I have continued researching for both what ist he problem and who could
work on it.

Of the people I have exchanged emails with Stephan Szabo seems to have a
decent understanding of the internals of the problem and whatever little I have
learnt about the problem and the magnitude of possible solutions came from
him emails.

I like the idea of doing some type of donation system for those of us
interested in getting inheritance improved. What I have seen so far makes
inheritance a risky proposition to use.

For example if you have
parent table
common field1 primary key
common field2

inherited table
unique field1
unique field2

It is NOT possible to have duplicates in common field1 if you insert into
the parent table, but it IS possible to create duplicaes in common field 1
if you do the insert with repeated fields in inherited table.

In a design I am working on I would use a serial for that column, which
works accros parent/inherited tables. But the risk is that it is possible
that if I EVER make a mistake in my coding and write to the primary key
column instead of getting the value from the sequence the database won't
catch the problem.

For a system where only a handfull of programmers are working it may not
be terribly bad, but if you had a system where teams of people are working
having the database not be able to inforce the uniqueness accross
parent/inheritted table is a problem.