DAP4: Notes on Constraints

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This page contains various thoughts about DAP4 constraints.

Projections

There are two kinds of "projection" implicit in DAP2 constraints.

  1. Range projections such as A[0:2:22] where the result keeps the same rank, but the dimensions sizes are reduced and the result is a subset of the values in the original array, A.
  2. Column projections, which are the traditional relation projections in which a relation (Sequence) has some of its columns (fields) removed. This might convert, for example, Sequence {int32 f1; float32 f2;} to Sequence {int32 f1;} if column/field f1 is projected away.

One oddity (flaw?) in the way DAP2 constraints are constructed is that they completely separate a (column) projection specification from any associated selection constraint. This makes interpretation of the constraint somewhat more difficult and also has the consequence that it is impossible to return two different projection+selection combinations over the same sequence/relation. I think, that we should strongly consider modifying the grammar of constraints to use something much closer to the SQL project-where kind of construct.

Extended Dimensional Selection

With respect to Nathan's proposal for selections, I might note that it does lose dimensional information that might be both useful and performance enhancing. For instance, it might be useful to be able to say something like

?sal[0:22][0:9][]<3.2

and get something back like this:

<Sequence name="sal">
    <Float64 name="sal">
      <Dimension size="23" />
      <Dimension size="10" />
    </Float64>
    <Float32 name="lat"/>
    <Float32 name="lon"/>
    <Float32 name="depth"/>
</Sequence>