On Fri, 6 Feb 2004, Martin Hill wrote:
> I'm a bit wary about adding manipulation directly to ADQL, as it seems that most
> datacenters will accept queries only, so it's handy to have a query-only schema
> to validate against. But we could have an ADML (Astronomy Database Manipulation
> Language...) that extends ADQL to include the new commands?
Well it's true now (as far as I know) that all data centres are essentially read-only (except for the special case of access by trusted insiders).
We don't know if this is going to be true for the future; if it is then we might as well abandon our efforts on things like MySpace, as the only place to write or update data is going to be the user's own machine, which makes the whole thing trivial or indeed solved already. If we do expect users to be able to write at a distance, then we need to consider "queries", well operations, which update tables and do all the other things that SQL can do, don't we?
-- Clive Page Dept of Physics & Astronomy, University of Leicester, Tel +44 116 252 3551 Leicester, LE1 7RH, U.K. Fax +44 116 252 3311Received on 2004-02-06Z17:03:28