- From: Jerven Bolleman <jerven.bolleman@isb-sib.ch>
- Date: Thu, 12 May 2011 16:32:55 +0200
- To: public-rdf-dawg-comments@w3.org
Dear workgroup, I was recently made aware that there is no easy way to get a guaranteed working pagination. i.e. QUERY OFFSET 0 LIMIT 5 page 1 QUERY OFFSET 5 LIMIT 5 page 2 QUERY OFFSET 10 LIMIT 5 page 3 Without adding an ORDER BY clause. Adding any kind of ORDER BY clause would be enough to ensure pagination worked. I would therefore like to see an ORDER BY * or ORDER BY ANY option. To ensure that the results come in some implementation specific order and that this can be used to show all possible results. Trying a few public current SPARQL implementations. With ORDER BY * showed that this is currently not implemented. Although pagination with OFFSET and LIMIT without an ORDER BY clause seems to work as a naive user (e.g. me) would expect. Meaning that for current SPARQL implementers it is no work at all other than dealing with a slightly different SPARQL grammar. Pagination guaranteed to succeed would then be i.e. QUERY OFFSET 0 LIMIT 5 ORDER BY ANY page 1 QUERY OFFSET 5 LIMIT 5 ORDER BY ANY page 2 QUERY OFFSET 10 LIMIT 5 ORDER BY ANY page 3 The other option is to expand the description of the OFFSET clause. For example the use of the OFFSET clause should guarantee that query results come back in a consistent order. I hope this concern makes sense. Regards, Jerven
Received on Thursday, 12 May 2011 14:33:32 UTC