As a part of some experimental work I've been doing, I need to write
what I think is best described as a stochastic quota query.
I would like to write a query like
SELECT RANDOM 5 COLUMN_FOO FROM TABLE_BAR

(also posted in sql group but got no replies, apolgies if that's bad
etiquette)
Hi,
Google released a corpus of n-grams collected from the Web.

CDT is a usenet newsgroup.
Isn't there are monitor somewhere out there that can get this MI5
persecution
crap out of the group?

This is a post from comp.databases.mysql:
<<let's say I want to ask a survey question, with checkboxes:
What animals do you like?
[] giraffe

I want to protect the result of a query. That means every database
update which change the result of the quer must be discovered.
For example:
the query is

I have to design following system and am quite stuck on what the best
way would be to solve the problem:
There are several of the same databases for different clients (they
have to be different because they are hosted on different machines).

I wonder if anybody here has spent much time thinking about the
practicalities of the "trans-relational model"?
I can see its value for joins that don't involve projections of
relations that have a great many attributes, however it seems to assume

Hi, I been working with SQL for a while and think I can handle with
most of it. Now I want to learn advanced topics like pivoting, views,
etc. Is there any good resource or books about advanced SQL? Most
resources I found in the web are too basic.

I couldn't read the article (site was down) which is
supposed to claim that RDBMSs "should be considered legacy technology.";
I don't see how the storage stategy necessarily
affects the relationalness of a DBMS. Nice reads anyway:

I am still fighting with the theoretical underpinning for 1NF. As
such, any comments would be greatfully accepted. The reason for my
concern is that there /seems/ instances where 1NF is insufficient. An
example occurred to me while I was wiring up a dimmer switch (at the

Many discussions point out one deficiency of NULLs:  that they collapse
multiple, distinct concepts into one ("no value possible," "value missing,"
"value not available at this time", etc).
What are the other theoretical problems?  My impression from skimming some