- From: Steve Harris <swh@ecs.soton.ac.uk>
- Date: Tue, 5 Jun 2007 07:16:27 +0100
- To: "Andrew Newman" <andrewfnewman@gmail.com>
- Cc: public-sparql-dev@w3.org
On 5 Jun 2007, at 06:55, Andrew Newman wrote:
>
> On 6/5/07, Steve Harris <swh@ecs.soton.ac.uk> wrote:
>> if that works then you have a bug. The behaviour of SPARQLs UNION
>> is not
>> very natural from a relation algebra p.o.v., and this may have
>> confused
>> developers familiar with that.
>>
>
> Isn't it just outer union? And isn't outer union just part of SQL 92.
> And isn't SQL 92 implemented by most (all?) databases.
In a sense. You can expand any SPARQL UNION into a set of SQL UNIONs,
but SQLs UNION doesn't allow you to explicitly write
:x :y ?z { ?z :p ?q } UNION { ?z :r ?q }
where the ?z-s are scoped to the whole expression and the ?q-s are
scoped to the block. In relational the equivalent would be to join
two expressions, each of two joins and use rho to unify the
variables. But, I personally wouldn't write it that way.
- Steve
Received on Tuesday, 5 June 2007 06:16:14 UTC