RE: [Hibernate-devel] New feature discussion (max query result list size)

[Gavin_King/Cirrus%<CI...@ci...>]

>> I think theres an interesting issue here in that while certain things
are
>> more directly and elegantly expressible in Java, others are much easier
to
>> express in a query language. I have a problem with some persistence
>> solutions that reject the idea of embedding query strings in application
>> code and try to construct a query through manipulation of objects.

>In general, I'm completely in favor of anything that reduces the amount of
>code, and expresses something at a higher semantic level, which query
>languages usually do (or there'd be no point to them).  But I think one
>problem with embedding query strings is that languages like Java aren't
very
>well suited to it, in the absence of some kind of preprocessing (like SQLJ
>or JSQL).  Not supporting multi-line strings, and having unnamed
>placeholders like "?" which are then dependent on sequence to match up
with
>external parameters, doesn't help matters.

hmmm, that was one thing I had been uncertain about. I always hated the
anonymous-looking "?" in JDBC. I had considered allowing "$1", "$2" etc
in Hibernate queries but this would have been harder to implement and
I decided to go for something that would be familiar to people who
only use JDBC.

We could still add support for $1, $2, etc if we wanted to. It might
even be worth the effort....

Implementing this would be a matter of replacing the $N with a ? and
then remapping parameter N to the sequential position of ?

Not really very hard to do.

>The argument I see is that restricting the number of records returned is
not
>very closely connected semantically to other things expressed in a query,
>which primarily relate to the content of the data being queried.  Adding
>something like this to the query language might be a convenience, but it
>doesn't meaningfully affect the expressivity of the query language.  From
>there, one could argue about keeping custom languages simple and focused,
or
>something... :)

yes, quite so.