RE: CfC: to publish the First Public Working Draft of Web Database spec; deadline 7 September

I am sorry to say 'No'.  If it is wrong time to speak out, please pardon me for keeping quiet for so long.

The 'Web Database' specification in its current form is not acceptable for the following reasons:

- Expecting a single writer model is not the way the relational databases have been designed.  Note: Neither Microsoft Jet nor Microsoft SQL CE exhibit this behavior.  The right way (read: ANSI way) is to have isolation levels for transactions.  I am happy to restrict the number of isolation levels to be supported are limited to what SQLite supports.  Namely, ReadCommitted and Serializable.  On the other hand, it might be good idea to have a connection level parameter/knob to say it is a read only connection Vs. read-write connection.  

- I am a new bee to web programming.   However, not having the ability to control when to commit or when to rollback is little uncomfortable.  It is as uncomfortable as treating the local storage as cookie and have UA clear it whenever it wishes (there is thread going on this local storage being treated as bookmark cache Vs. cookie cache).  In terms of scenario or use case, think about shopping cart web site.  I am going thru a list of products.  I have added some of the products to shopping cart, but then I realized that the total amount is exceeding the limit I have in my mind.  In this case, I would like go and drop some of the products to bring the total value to limit I have in my mind.  In this case, I don't think User Agent should open another transaction to execute 'DELETE' statements.

- SQL as the query language is a hard one to bet on as almost all databases have failed to be compliant.  Be it SQLite, SQL CE, BDB.   All have tried to stick to a behavior set by some existing products like SQL Server or Oracle or Sybase.  I can quote some examples to prove that compliance is not achieved in SQL world, but I defer that to keep this mail short.  In fact, this spec itself did not start to put SQL query language stuff because of the same standardization issues.  "[SQL]  The precise dialect has not yet been specified."

Before we make this as a public working draft, I would like to see the spec become multi database vendor friendly.  Today the spec reflects SQLite architecture which is against the basic value system of standards.  I am sure you guys would also agree with me that standards are there to promote multiple vendors and provide a platform for healthy competition.

I like SQLite for what it is, but a specific implementation becoming a standard is not digestible for me (and for many).  You might be thinking it is weird to expect the spec to be completely written ground up than accepting the current SQLite reverse engineered spec; but I think it is right thing for all of us (i.e. W3C standardization body, database vendors, browser vendors, and web developers).

Thanks,
Laxmi

-----Original Message-----
From: public-webapps-request@w3.org [mailto:public-webapps-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Maciej Stachowiak
Sent: Tuesday, September 01, 2009 5:05 PM
To: Arthur Barstow
Cc: public-webapps
Subject: Re: CfC: to publish the First Public Working Draft of Web Database spec; deadline 7 September


On Aug 31, 2009, at 11:01 AM, Arthur Barstow wrote:

> This is a Call for Consensus (CfC) to publish the First Public Working 
> Draft (FPWD) of the Web Database spec:
>
> http://dev.w3.org/html5/webdatabase/
>
> Note that at one point in time, the Web Database spec's functionality 
> was included in the Web Storage spec.
>
> As with all of our CfCs, positive response is preferred and encouraged 
> and silence will be assumed to be assent. The deadline for comments is 
> September 7.

I support publishing.

  - Maciej

Received on Tuesday, 1 September 2009 12:25:28 UTC