On April 6, 2003 10:07 am, Nickolay Samofatov wrote:

> Hello, Helen !
>
> >We can do *much* better than all this - via blob filters. I make it
> >plural, because I don't think it's going to be a case of "one size fits
> >all". For example, standard XML may be too limiting and we'd want to have
> >a SGML filter too; and XHTML and ....
>
> Of course, Helen. I know about UDFs and BLOB filters.
> I was not proposing to built XML support into the very core engine.
> It would make it a way too complex and messy.
>
> We need to extend capability of engine to allow to write packages
> (something like in Oracle)
> using PSQL and other languages (probably C/C++). This is not too difficult,
> in fact
> as we have stored procedures, UDFs and blob filters. All we need is to
> extend their abilities a little.
> Then we can write packages for full-text seach and XML manipulations.
> So people who needs may install them, and others may not.
>

Personally I think we might be best served by a plugin architecture, where
there are hooks established in various parts of the engine and clients where
functionality can be added via the plugin. One area would be additional
field types, another might be security, still another might be post wire
protocol. In fact you could probably build a new engine that just handles
the extreme basics, and plugin everything else.