new TAP-1.1 WD released

[Dave Morris]

On 2017-07-20 00:30, Mark Taylor wrote:
> 
>     Similarly, mandating "*" as the arraysize value for the
>     various character data columns in these tables is
>     unnecessarily restrictive; there's no reason that
>     services should not return fixed-width character array
>     columns here if they want to.

For individual services I agree, but this could cause problems when 
uploading data from one service into another.

If service A defines column_name as CHAR[10] and service B defines it as 
CHAR[8], if a uses takes a VOTable result from A and uploads it into B 
then the column names could get truncated and the query could fail.

Allowing different services to have different size limits places the 
burden on the end user to check that they are all interoperable.

If the user is trying to coordinate queries and results from 20+ 
different services, they would have to make sure their queries were 
sequenced in ascending order of column name length.

If one of the services changed the size of their column names, a 
sequence of queries that worked yesterday might not work today.

Hope this helps,
Dave

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Dave Morris
Research Software Engineer
Wide Field Astronomy Unit
Institute for Astronomy
University of Edinburgh
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