Notes from the TAP/ADQL splinter session on Wednesday 21 May 2014 at the IVOA Interop meeting at ESAC.

During the meeting the group reviewed a number of proposed changes to TAP and ADQL described in the TAP Implementation Notes Version 1.0.

The following section lists the recommendations agreed at the meeting for each of the changes that were reviewed.

After each section there is a table for adding feedback. Please add your vote to indicate

• +1 You agree with the decision
• 0 You don't mind either way
• -1 You disagree with the decision

If you vote to disagree please provide a brief one line explanation describing why (or a link to a new page if you prefer).

For items that need more discussion please raise them on the working group mailing list.

Thank you for your feedback. -- DaveMorris - 2014-07-18

Example item

Some text describing the item, with a reference to the original item in the TAP Implementation Notes.

May 2014 Interop

A brief summary of the discussion at the May Interop.

Community feedback

Name	date	vote	notes
MarcoMolinaro	2014-07-18	+1
DaveMorris	2014-07-18	+1	Yes, good idea
DaveMorris	2014-07-18	0	Ok, as long as it is optional
DaveMorris	2014-07-18	-1	It isn't the right colour, our users prefer blue background.

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Separator Nonterminal

This item proposes two options to clarify the use of whitespace and comments in ADQL.

One option for such a clarification is to amend section 2.1 of [std:ADQL] with a subsection 2.1.4, "Tokens and literals", containing text like the following (taken essentially from [std:SQL1992]).

1. Any token may be followed by a separator. A nondelimiter token shall be followed by a delimiter token or a separator.

Since the full rules for the separator are somewhat more complex in [std:ADQL], an attractive alternative could be to omit the separator nonterminal from the grammar and to just note:

1. Whitespace and comments can occur wherever they can occur in [std:SQL1992].

May 2014 Interop

It was agreed that this item should be included in the errata note for the current, [std:ADQL-20081030], version of the standard.

Community feedback

Name	date	vote	notes
DaveMorris	2014-07-18	0	Accept either option

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Type System

This item proposes adding new section to introduce a notion of types into section 2 of the ADQL recommendation.

See the original text for details of the proposed type mappings.

May 2014 Interop

It was agreed that this item should be discussed further, with a view to including it in the next (minor) version of the [std:ADQL] standard.

Community feedback

Name	date	vote	notes
DaveMorris	2014-07-18	-1	In general yes, but some parts need further discussion (see below).

Transporting BLOB, CLOB, TIMESTAMP, POINT and REGION as char(*) strings should not imply the ADQL string concatenation operator are applicable. -- DaveMorris - 2014-09-04