Subject: are queries easy to write?

From: "Ed Robertson" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 7 Jun 1993 13:27:01 -0500 (EST)

| Rick Snodgrass says:
|
|1. .... Five queries can't be that hard to write.

In fact, for some categories it is difficult to come up with NATURAL
queries which aren't variations on the same theme.  For instance,
there are few occasions where one is interested only in the time of
some facts (class O2 - boy this may get me in trouble: "O2 doesn't
make sense sometimes" :-).  The exceptions are very local queries,
when we already know the fact and just wish its time, or very global
queries, concerning the overall state ("when were there the most
employees") which require aggregation or forall.

Anyway, maybe we should have some indication when certain categories
seem less natural.  This would facilitate purning out classes.  How
about a macro like \classremark#1 which Christian can define as he
pleases, including null.

---

From: "Rick Snodgrass" <rts>
Date: Mon, 7 Jun 1993 11:45:55 MST

> From: "Ed Robertson" <[email-masked]>
> 

This is a good point.

It seems that the appendices that will already be present are a good
location for this kind of information.  Future pruning of the classes
is an excellent idea, especially as the classes will continue to grow
more numerous as we expand the scope of the benchmark.

---

From: "Christian S. Jensen" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 8 Jun 1993 03:42:25 +0200

> Ed Robertson writes:

I agree with Ed's observation that it is not always easy to find five
good queries for a class. (I choose two classes of O2 queries myself!)

I recommend that you feel free to include some general comments for
each or some of the classes you are writing queries for. Simply place
the comments right after the section heading for the class, and before
the first query.

Best regards,
Christian
[email-masked]