Re: UDF returns table to 'feed' a call back to itself ... how? (cross post)

Tech-Archive recommends: Fix windows errors by optimizing your registry

From: Joe Celko (joe.celko_at_northface.edu)
Date: 03/26/04 

Date: Fri, 26 Mar 2004 13:42:59 -0800

>> I would be amazed if you get a response. <<

One or two have been really good about a reply. I got one guy who was
using SQL has his first ever programming language (aaarrgh!). On
another newsgroup, I have had a good discussion with a lady who is from
the Nelson-Pick DBMS world. I found a few old IMS, IDMS types learning
DB2 on main frames. Most seem to be VB, C++, Java and whatever "PL du
jour" is being used in their shop currently. I am amazed at the "OO
kids" who have a strong physical file model in their heads instead of a
more abtract one; I would have guessed that OO would lead to more
abstract thinking.

Ever read Weinberg's PSYCHOLOGY OF COMUTER PROGRAMMING? It is a classic
and has been reprinted in a silver edition a little while back.

>> One question though, how can you be so sure that this is a newbie
error. In fact, the process that is being
used is taking denormalized data and making it more normal. It is not
out of the realm of possibility that this person has a normalized
database and is getting cruddy data from an outside source. <<

I have a three part series on how to do this kind of scrubbing in SQL in
DBAzine running right now. Hey, I can write kludge code with the best
of them :)

I don't advocate scrubbing data with SQL. But I had enough requests
from people who were going to do it anyway, I wrote down the steps. I
view it as the part of driver's ed where they tell you "When you are too
drunk to be driving, butyou are driving anyway, then do this..."

>> Don't get me wrong, I like to tear into arrogant newbies as much as
the next guy with an extra large hat holder but the problem .. <<

Nah, at my age I am sure I enjoy it more. My wife is at a monastary and
I cannot get permission to buy either a misstress or a 1965 Studebaker.

>> Say this data exists in a different system, in this format. Is there
a better way to do this kind of thing? Should it be done in a functional
language? <<

Sure; ETL tools are made for this. It is a whole software category
these days.

For parsing, a procedural language is probably a better choice. We used
to write stuff like this in C all the time to parse COBOL data into our
files in binary.

Or even use a parser generator like Meta (is it sitll around? It used
regular expressions and build a C program. It was easier to use than
YACC when you knew grep(), but not as powerful).

--CELKO--
 ===========================
 Please post DDL, so that people do not have to guess what the keys,
constraints, Declarative Referential Integrity, datatypes, etc. in your
schema are.

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