Firebird Future Development [LWN.net]

Firebird Future Development

Posted Nov 30, 2005 22:26 UTC (Wed) by helebor (guest, #34227)
Parent article: Firebird Future Development

Score for leandro: 0 (ignoramus).

New versions of the SQL standard don't wipe out previous versions. The purpose of the standards is to define how an implementation should be surfaced in the language of that RDBMS **IF** it is implemented in that language, certainly NOT to arbitrarily change existing standards every few years.

Making the existing implementation of a feature "SQL-nnnn-compliant" means taking a feature that was implemented in that RDBMS before a standard existed for that feature and re-implementing it once the standard is known. So a feature isn't going to be reimplemented as e.g. "SQL-2003-compliant" if the standard for that feature was first published in SQL-99 and didn't change in SQL-2003.

When introducing a feature into the language sets of a RDBMS, it's recommended practice always to make it compliant with the standard if a standard exists for it. The publication of new standards takes years and always lags far behind the NEED for specific standards. Hence, reimplementing (commonly advanced) features to comply with what the standards committee eventually publishes is part of a responsible, professional software development process.

Furthermore, anyone who actually understands database development will understand clearly that reimplementations of existing language features are not done lightly. The new implementation surfaces new syntax which would break existing application and stored procedure code if it were pushed in without keeping the old implementation available. The old implementation is usually declared "deprecated", which warns developers that it will disappear some time in the future. This, too, is essential to a responsible development process.

Therefore, if a new version of the standards - SQL-2003, for example - defines new or extended syntax for a feature that existed in a previous standard, it is essential that the new syntax remains consistent with the existing syntax. It's not the purpose of the standards committee to break things. Many deprecated features exist in the standards, as well.

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