TDTRUE@pucc.Princeton.EDU (Thomas True) (03/04/88)
In article <1169@ucsfcca.ucsf.edu>, brianc@daedalus (Brian Colfer) writes: > >> 2) "give me the first n of" -- from a problem in bibliographic >> search >> 3) "give me any n of" > >Non-sensical from a relationship model perspective. Plus from a >application perspective to arbitrarialy select a set of row(s) because of >its position is illogical. The better task formulation is: > >Give me all the rows with these meaningful (date, author, publisher, >title) limtations. > >Or output the whole query to a file and then use some utility head/tail >to browse the content. Unfortunately, this response does not deal with what I take to be the real problem. Bibliographic databases tend to be both large and imperfectly defined. Although some searches begin with an author or a title more often they are less exact. Often you want to perform a subject search that may or may not retrieve the information you want; the query may select many rows that have nothing to do with the information you want. Looking at a few rows is not "illogical" from this standpoint, but perfectly reasonable. True, based on what you see you may erroneously decide to respecify your search, but better this then spend time and CPU as you output mostly noise. I would not want to search a database of a million books if it hewed so closely to the relational model as Brian would like. Tom True Princeton University TDTRUE@PUCC.PRINCETON.EDU