Re: is GiST still alive?

On Wed, 22 Oct 2003, Christopher Browne wrote:
> No, "tables" wouldn't be the right way to do it.
>
> But it's going to be troubled, in any case, because of the
> every-popular mixtures of:
>
>  a) Often weird declarations of what character sets are in use;
I gotta admit that I haven't spend too much attention on that specific
part. But couln't you just store it in the character set that was
originally used to populate the document?

>  b) Pointers to other parts of a document;
do you mean to the parent element and the child elements?
This is specifially what my custom format is designed for.

>  c) What's a "database" going to consist of?  One XML document?  Or
>     many?
many, each of which can be up to about 1TB

> And if many, then then how do you have a centralized
>     reference point to navigate from to find the document that you
>     want?
This one could be a table, or another xml document.

> And "navigate" was a carefully chosen word; what you then have is
> essentially a network database system, and have to then start making
> up ways of describing queries.  XQuery may be better than CODASYL of
> yesteryear, but you're still left writing a lot of recursive code.
> (Thus making those that understand the Lambda Nature more powerful...)
I don't get your point? XQuery works on one document, IIRC.

> At the end, do you have a "database?"  Or just a set of documents?
> It's hard to tell, a priori.
OK, know waht you mean. I'd say it's a database, because the information
is stored not plain - but in pages and in an optimized format for
insertion, deletion and querying.

> And do you think this is likely to be useful because:
>
>  a) You have some clear notion as to why this ought to be useful?
yes. Modyfing and querying plain xml files sucks performancewise once your
documents get a little larger (100 MB+)

>  b) XML is a big buzzword, and people have been able to succesfully
>     attract "research funds" or "vulture capital" on the basis of
>     having that acronym in a proposal?
That time's over anyways, isn't it?

-- 
Gregor Zeitlinger
gregor@zeitlinger.de