- From: Alan Kent <ajk@mds.rmit.edu.au>
- Date: Thu, 9 May 2002 11:55:26 +1000
- To: www-zig@w3.org
On Wed, May 08, 2002 at 07:43:43AM -0400, Ray denenberg wrote:
> But there isn't any explicit rule that the server can't supply a database
> name other than A and B. The server might, for example, have an alias for
> "A", say "AA"; or it might supply the name of a database that is a subset
> or superset of A or B.
I have nothing technical to add to what Ray has said, but I had a
concrete example that I thought might be of interest.
We support the above (database aliases), and have found both semantics
useful. That is, sometimes you want to return the alias name, and
sometimes you want to return the database name behind the alias. We
found it depended on what the purpose of the alias was.
Sometimes our customers use an alias to build multiple small(er)
databases, possibily distributed over multiple machines. The alias
hides this fact from the user, so all records are returned as
belonging to the alias ("News" mapping onto "News.host1", "News.host2"
etc).
The other times the alias was a convent way to query multiple but
different databases. Eg: a 'newspaper' alias mapping on to 'The
Wall Street Journal' and 'The Financial Review' and 'The Herald'.
It was useful to know the database the record came from as different
formatting rules might be appropriate (for example).
So we ended up letting the database administrator choose for data
base aliases whether to return the alias name or the underlying
database name.
Alan
Received on Wednesday, 8 May 2002 21:56:04 UTC