ADQL INTO

Wil O'Mullane wrote:

> In you previous mail you have slipped an 'into' into ADQL. Now that is
> not in the spec which is on the table so far. Now SADQL departs from
> the prose specification. If we want 'into' in our semantic at this stage
> then we need to revise the specification also.

Agreed - I mentioned it as a proposed extension as part of the proposed SADQL. I think it will be useful to have some way of describing where you want the results to go - eg to an FTP server, or a MySpace server (for us Astrogrid types) or returned directly. We could do with adding target tables, for example for our data warehousing centers.

At the moment we (Astrogrid) have to set these things anyway - it seems to me that the query language is a suitable place to put it?

Similarly we could do with an element included in the INTO that describes the format of the results - preferably by pointing to a schema in the case of XML documents such as VOTable.

The datacenter would have to publish as part of its metadata the formats and protocols it is capable of handling.

What do people think? Is specifying the target location & format, as well as the result set in the FROM clause, a suitable thing to add to ADQL?

Cheers,

Martin

-- 
Martin Hill
Software Engineer
AstroGrid @ ROE
Tel: +44 7901 55 24 66
www.astrogrid.org