Re: TAP information schema

From: Patrick Dowler <patrick.dowler-at-nrc-cnrc.gc.ca>
Date: Thu, 11 Oct 2007 17:03:20 -0700


On 2007-10-11 16:05, Doug Tody wrote:
>> Pat wrote:
> > For the VOSpace example, if I was implementing that I would most
> > likely make vospace a database (for storage allocation purposes),
> > require authentication, and give each user implicit schema
> > creation privaledge. Then the uploaded VOtable would be known as
> > vospace.$user.$tableName and I would have to do minimal work to make
> > that happen and protect one user's tables from another.
>
> So what do you do with MySQL (and probably others) where there is
> only one catalog? As we would like to be able to use ADQL to access
> both vospace tables and data tables in the same query, the only option
> (other than brute force copying tables) is to implement the vospace with
> a schema ("database" in MySQL).

Well, that is the issue - some people use one catalog and multiple schemata and others use multiple catalog and default or implicit (user) schemata. We have to accomodate both because both are in use and required in one system or another. What I meant was "if I was implementing VOSpace on top of a db that supported multiple of each" (eg DB2 and sybase here). If it is MySQL underneath then the implementor has no choice but to use schemata to separate things (either a vospace schema and manually separate tables, or a bunch of schemata nominally managed by one VOSpace service. Either is doable. I just don't think we can have the TAP metadata dictate which one someone choses, so we have to ultimately (maybe not now) expose catalog, schema, and table concepts.

Anyway, I don't think we disagree. If this was the future ultra magic version of VOQL with XQueryMagic and ZOntologyMapper then we could hide stuff, but ADQL is mostly SQL and that means we can't hide stuff without being bitten later on. Anyone who wants to hide these details can do so by telling the user one thing (eg giving them unique table names) and re-writing the query to something else, but many arguments have been made that one should not have to do this and should in theory be able to more or less pass the query through with minor syntactic massaging.

-- 

Patrick Dowler
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Received on 2007-10-12Z02:02:08