Hi Pat,
> - the difference in opinions on various TAP issues is not all that large
> conceptually, just lots of details differ
I agree that there are places where our collective opinions on the synchronous features of TAP are probably closer than they seem.
> My thought right now is that TAP is somewhat different from other DAL services
I also agree that TAP is somewhat different from other DAL services.
In particular, I will shortly post a discussion (by an external author)
of asynchronous querying for TAP. This discussion explains very clearly
why the current DAL model works very well for e.g. SIAP and SSAP, but
not so well for long-running tabular data queries. I'm afraid it
is a reasonably long message (sorry!), but that is mostly because it
takes the time to express itself very clearly and understandably. I do
hope everyone can at least glance at it.
If, as that discussion suggests, the DAL model is not a good fit for asynchronous ADQL querying, I don't think we should be *constrained* to make any/every part of TAP concur with the pre-existing DAL protocols (however well they work for other kinds of data). It may be that some aspects *do* concur naturally with the existing DAL-based protocols for other kinds of data, of course; but let's not force the whole thing to be a square peg for a round hole.
Cheers,
Kona
-- Kona Andrews kea-at-roe.ac.uk AstroGrid Project http://www.astrogrid.org IfA, Royal Observatory, Blackford Hill, Edinburgh EH9 3HJReceived on 2007-05-01Z16:58:09