TAP information schema

[Patrick Dowler]

It isn't really all that dire :)

The crux is that to use TAP the user needs to know the table name 
unambiguously; in the db this is the fully qualified table name (FQTN for 
short), which is $catalog.$schema.$table

For the purposes of TAP 1.0, it would be sufficient to say that the VOResource 
metadata about tables an columns (which is what one needs for discovery 
anyway) has to specify unique, unambiguous table names.

What we should be careful about is to make sure that we do not include any 
semantic meaning in such FQTNs - just say they have to be unique within the 
service and leave it at that. In MySQL there is one catalog, so FQTNs can be 
reduced to $schema.$table in that case. In general one always has a default 
catalog they are connected to, so any TAP service which keeps all the content 
in one catalog could do the same... others that expose multiple catalogs via 
a single TAP (eg upload VOTables to a VOSpace and they are available in  the 
service) might want to do that or they might want to use a separate catalog; 
that is defintely what I would do. Still others might have historically used 
the catalog as the namespace (we do that in our sybase servers, eg), so there 
we would use FQTNs like $catalog..$table or $catalog.dbo.$table.

Summary: I think we could get away with just having 1+ opaque unique table 
names in the VOResource metadata and TAP implementors can decide if they want 
to put something arbitrary and map it to their DB or they can just put their 
real FQTN in there and not have to process the ADQL at all. We just have to 
make sure this thing has no specific meaning (well, people will see and parse 
it and make assumptions anyway, that's unavoidable) that ties us down later.

my 2c,

Pat

On 2007-10-12 01:08, Tony Linde wrote:
> I thought TAP was a mechanism for sending ADQL through to registered
> services. The various posts here sound like trying to solve perceived
> problems with ADQL and Registry in TAP: that IMHO is the wrong way round.
> TAP spec should simply be used to push ADQL to a service then you get the
> changes you want into ADQL and the Registry and TAP still works. If ADQL is
> changed so that it supports qualified table names then, and only then,
> should you update TAP to support the new spec, not try to predict what ADQL
> might look like in the future. If OTOH you are saying no-one can possibly
> use ADQL as it stands and there is no point producing TAP based on the
> current ADQL spec then you should get ADQL changed first, but I really do
> not think that is the case.

-- 

Patrick Dowler
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