xml-dev - Re: XML and LDAP: Common APIs?

[tpassin@home.com]

Ken North wrote -
> << an SQL example, if I ask
>
> select employee_name, employee_age from employee
>
> I don't have to know the data type >>
>
> That's because a CREATE TABLE statement defined the types for
employee_name
> and employee_age. You are implicitly using those types unless you cast the
> results to another type.
>

That's true, but ***I*** don't necessarily have to know the types.  Haven't
you run queries against other people's databases?  You may never have seen
the data definition statements, you may never know if a number is stored as
an integer, a long integer, or some decimal encoding, nor a string as a long
varchar.  Yet you can often get usable results.  Not always, I agree, but
surprisingly often.

Cheers,

Tom Passin