Re: SQL plotting

[Hans-Bernhard B. <br...@ph...>]

On Mon, 17 May 2004, Wesley Morgan wrote:

> Has there been any discussion about integrating support for plotting
> results of queries from database backends? 

No.  And if there were, I'ld be strictly against it, on several grounds.

1) It completely violates the Unix tool philosophy.  "One job <--> one
tool".  Parsing and handling SQL is not gnuplot jobs, by a wide margin.

2) It's a can of worms --- which SQL servers would we support?  Or, more
to the point: who is going to keep up with all of them?  And how can we
possibly justify not support some of them, once we support others?

3) It's utterly unportable.

This is clearly a job for Perl or similar scripting languages.  If you
want to use gnuplot to plot, fine: script it from the outside.  Moving
these kinds of commands into gnuplot is not the right way of doing this.

-- 
Hans-Bernhard Broeker (br...@ph...)
Even if all the snow were burnt, ashes would remain.