Bob Dionne wrote: > Mike, > > I'd be interested in your thoughts on this. Damien presented the UnQL stuff to us, some time ago before he left the CouchDB project, and I thought then it was overly ambitious. > > I agree that SQL is awesome and hard to get away from after thinking in terms of relations for years. I'd love to see an alternative to SQL that was a better fit for document stores, that takes into account that document are sorts of like objects with attributes. There was considerable work done in this area years ago by folks working in functional dbs. > Umm.... CQL (Contextual Query Language, formerly known as Common Query Language). Developed by the library community for querying metadata. SRU (Search/Retrieve via URL) embeds CQL in a RESTful API. Sort of OpenSearch on steroids. Some mature implementations floating around. Working example of a search string: http://alcme.oclc.org/srw/search/SiteSearchDocumentation?query=dc.title= pears&version=1.1&maximumRecords=10 Now an SRU interface to CouchDB would be interesting. (Amazing how people always want to re-invent things rather than do a little research.) Miles Fidelman -- In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra