[MOBY-dev] Re: [MOBY] join operations

[Ken Steube]

On 23 Jan 2003, Mark Wilkinson wrote:

> > Then, forward it to
> > one of the services to fill in X values.  That services fills in its
> > part and sends to the second service.
>
> Ugly ugly ugly :-)

At first thought it seems ugly, but:

My idea uses SOAP exactly the way it was intended to be used ...
collecting info from many servers and combining it into a single coherent
result.  It's simple to implement, could be very robust and fault
tolerant, and leaves all kinds of room for speed optimization.

>
> I may be alone here, but I absolutely do NOT want this kind of
> responsibility to fall on the service provider.  IMO this is a 100%
> client-side problem.

To achieve any kind of efficiency a join will have to be a server-side
operation. Since biological databases are generally small our limiting
factor is network bandwidth.

> What I am concerned about is putting the responsibility for fulfilling
> an arbitrary request on the shoulders of a possibly unrelated service
> provider.

A join is perfectly abstractable.  We can write a single join client and
copy it identically to every MOBY service provider.  Pass the join request
to the join service on the appropriate server, it fetches both sets of
data, does the join, and returns to the client or forwards to another
service for additional operations.

We can do a lot of the relational dbase operations this way: outer joins,
group by, aggregation...

If we want to do MOBY queries in an SQL-like language then this is an
excellent way to go.

Ken

-------------------------------------
Ken Steube            steube at sdsc.edu
San Diego Supercomputer Center @ UCSD
San Diego, California             USA