[Zope-dev] RE: [SmartObjects] Zope Object Query Language (ZOQL) Proposal

[Jay, Dylan]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Olivier Deckmyn [mailto:odeckmyn.list@teaser.fr]
> Sent: Tuesday, 19 June 2001 6:47 PM
> To: Stephan Richter; SmartObjects Mailing List
> Subject: RE: [SmartObjects] Zope Object Query Language (ZOQL) Proposal
> 
> 
> A ) Devil lawyer :
> ------------------
> Why not reuse a existing standard query language ?

First I'll have to say I'm bit to busy to follow the whole thread and see
what the details of the query languages being discussed are. For a long time
however I have believed that there is a need for a strong queury language
for Zope.
One that gives a powerful and consistant API and also allows for things like
transparent indexing. We need something that combines the power of
relational joins but also the heirachical queries like XPath. 

Such a query language is not a new idea and is activly being devoloped for
XML. XML and ZODB are very similar. I think the gains made by reusing an XML
query language would be huge. 

XQuery seems to be the most powerful and the most applicable and has a lot
of smart people working on it.

http://www.w3.org/TR/xquery/

"XML is an extremely versatile markup language, capable of labeling the
information content of diverse data sources including structured and
semi-structured documents, relational databases, and object repositories. A
query language that uses the structure of XML intelligently can express
queries across all these kinds of data, whether physically stored in XML or
viewed as XML via middleware. Because query languages have traditionally
been designed for specific kinds of data, most existing proposals for XML
query languages are robust for particular types of data sources but weak for
other types. This specification describes a new query language called
XQuery, which is designed to be broadly applicable across all types of XML
data sources."

Can I suggest that someone have a closer look and see if this language can
cover all the needs of a general ZODB query language? such as I think was
suggested at the beginning of this thread

http://imail.iuveno-net.de/pipermail/smartobjects/2001-June/000116.html