Saturday, 11 July 2009

Provenance again

Today's version of the software aims to fix a number of issues.
(a) a bug in transaction handling that resulted in premature closure of transactions
(b) a number of corrections to provenance handling and subtypes.
(c) a new system table called Sys$Object which makes it easier to see the provenance of tables and types.

To try out the new ideas, here are some examples.

1. To have database objects or inserted rows with a particular provenance, say something like
begin transaction with provenance 'http://example.com'
...
commit
Pyrrho refers to this internally as an import provenance, but of course it is more flexible than that.

2. To have rows in a table associated with a provenance, you can also say
insert with provenance '/data' into ...
and then the rows have a provenance consisting of eith or both the import and row provenance (if both are specified the provenance is the result of concatenating them).

There is no way of modifying provenance (this would be heresy).

3. Subtypes can be associated with a uri: there is a WITH syntax defined in Pyrrho for this purpose, e.g.
create type abcint as integer with 'http://abc.net'
and then if desired the subtype can be used for values you want to mark with the URI, by using (say) treat(11) as abcint instead of just 11.
Such a subtype behaves like an integer of course, but you can select on such subtype values using the OF predicate, e.g. select * from a where b is of(only abcint).

Write to me with any problems.

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