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Re: Limiting a query by setting a maximum number of distinct values for a given variable.

From: Steve Harris <steve.harris@garlik.com>
Date: Tue, 19 Oct 2010 13:55:41 +0100
Cc: Alexandre Passant <alexandre.passant@deri.org>, Damian Steer <pldms@mac.com>, Semantic Web <semantic-web@w3.org>
Message-Id: <D3FFA522-0A39-4E8D-A864-7F29DF8E2892@garlik.com>
To: Olivier Rossel <olivier.rossel@gmail.com>
On 2010-10-19, at 10:31, Olivier Rossel wrote:

> Thanks for all your comments.
> I am now wondering about a few things and would appreciate your feedback:
> 
> the use case I present is, in my opinion, very classic.
> Most UIs dealing with a big set of data display them in a page-based manner.
> 
> Steve proposes the application layer to handle the mismatch between
> the LIMIT/OFFSET
> queries and the page-based UI.
> 
> If the only usage of the application layer is to refactor result
> sets'rows into page-based UIs, then
> an interesting alternative is to include the page-based query feature
> in the SPARQL spec.
> Any opinion?

I think it would be hard to specify. That doesn't mean it shouldn't be done of course.

(Arguably) the most obvious fix would be to have some way of writing a top-down subquery, but that has issues around the execution complexity of the resulting query, as I understand it.

> What could be the technical issues of such a proposal?
> As far as I understand, it is just an alternative way for the DB to
> count the number of data
> to return. Not a big deal, it seems, and it would avoid some tricky
> coding at the application layer.
> 
> 
> PS: I think SQL does not provide any better alternative, beyond
> (tedious to write) subqueries. True?

Subqueries in SQL aren't sufficient, they have the same execution rule as SPARQL. You'd need stored procedures, or a complex multi-stage query using temporary tables.

There are tricks that can be done with GROUP_CONCAT, but it's non-standard (in SQL), and only works for some limited cases.

- Steve

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Received on Tuesday, 19 October 2010 12:56:22 UTC

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