Terrible events in Whitby

Working with tuples and arrays

If we have all the city data together, we can do a single insert with a FOR and UNION loop again. Let’s imagine that we have some data inside a tuple, which seems similar to an array but is quite different. One big difference is that a tuple can hold different types, so this is okay:

('Buda-Pesth', 402706), ('London', 3500000), ('Munich', 230023), ('Bistritz', 9100)

In this case, the type is called a tuple<str, int64>.

Before we start using these tuples, let’s make sure that we understand the difference between the two. To start, let’s look at slicing arrays and strings in a bit more detail.

You’ll remember that we use square brackets to access part of an array or a string. So SELECT ['Mina Murray', 'Lucy Westenra'][1]; will give the output {'Lucy Westenra'} (that’s index number 1).

You’ll also remember that we can separate the starting and ending index with a colon, like in this example:

SELECT NPC.name[0:10];

This prints the first ten letters of every NPC’s name:

{
  'Jonathan H',
  'The innkee',
  'Mina Murra',
  'John Sewar',
  'Quincey Mo',
  'Lucy Weste',
  'Arthur Hol',
}

But the same can be done with a negative number if you want to start from the index at the end. For example:

SELECT NPC.name[2:-2];

This prints from index 2 up to 2 indexes away from the end (it’ll cut off the first two letters on each side). Here’s the output:

{
  'nathan Hark',
  'e innkeep',
  'na Murr',
  'hn Sewa',
  'incey Morr',
  'cy Westen',
  'thur Holmwo',
}

Tuples are quite different: they behave more like object types with properties that have numbers instead of names. This is why tuples can hold different types together: strings with arrays, int64s with float32s, anything.

So this is completely fine:

SELECT {('Bistritz', 9100, cal::to_local_date(1887, 5, 6)), ('Munich', 230023, cal::to_local_date(1887, 5, 8))};

The output is:

{
  ('Bistritz', 9100, <cal::local_date>'1887-05-06'),
  ('Munich', 230023, <cal::local_date>'1887-05-08'),
}

But now that the type is set (this one is type tuple<str, int64, cal::local_date>) you can’t mix it up with other tuple types. So this is not allowed:

SELECT {(1, 2, 3), (4, 5, '6')};

EdgeDB will give an error because it won’t try to work with tuples that are of different types. It complains:

ERROR: QueryError: operator 'UNION' cannot be applied to operands of type 'tuple<std::int64, std::int64, std::int64>' and 'tuple<std::int64, std::int64, std::str>'
  Hint: Consider using an explicit type cast or a conversion function.

In the above example we could easily just cast the last string into an integer and EdgeDB will be happy again: SELECT {(1, 2, 3), (4, 5, <int64>'6')};.

To access the fields of a tuple you still start from the number 0, but you write the numbers after a . instead of inside a []. Now that we know all this, we can update all our cities at the same time. It looks like this:

FOR data in {('Buda-Pesth', 402706), ('London', 3500000), ('Munich', 230023), ('Bistritz', 9100)}
UNION (
  UPDATE City FILTER .name = data.0
  SET {
    population := data.1
  }
);

So it sends each tuple into the FOR loop, filters by the string (which is data.0) and then updates with the population (which is data.1).

Let’s finish this section with a final note about casting. We know that we can cast into any scalar type, and this works for tuples of scalar types too. It uses the same format with <> except that you put it inside of <tuple>, like this:

WITH london := ('London', 3500000),
SELECT <tuple<json, int32>>london;

That gives us this output:

{("\"London\"", 3500000)}

Here’s another example if we need to do some math with floats on London’s population:

WITH london := <tuple<json, float64>>('London', 3500000),
  SELECT (london.0, london.1 / 9);

The output is {("\"London\"", 388888.8888888889)}.

Ordering results and using math

Now that we have some numbers, we can start playing around with ordering and math. Ordering is quite simple: type ORDER BY and then indicate the property/link you want to order by. Here we order them by population:

SELECT City {
  name,
  population
} ORDER BY .population DESC;

This returns:

{
  Object {name: 'London', population: 3500000},
  Object {name: 'Buda-Pesth', population: 402706},
  Object {name: 'Munich', population: 230023},
  Object {name: 'Whitby', population: 14400},
  Object {name: 'Bistritz', population: 9100},
}

What’s DESC? It means descending, so largest first and then going down. If we didn’t write DESC then it would have assumed that we wanted to sort ascending. You can also write ASC (to make it clear to somebody reading the code for example), but you don’t need to.

For some actual math, you can check out the functions in std here as well as the math module here. Instead of looking at each one, let’s do a single big query to show some of them all together. To make the output nice, we will write it together with strings explaining the results and then cast them all to <str> so we can join them together using ++.

WITH cities := City.population
SELECT (
  'Number of cities: ' ++ <str>count(cities),
  'All cities have more than 50,000 people: ' ++ <str>all(cities > 50000),
  'Total population: ' ++ <str>sum(cities),
  'Smallest and largest population: ' ++ <str>min(cities) ++ ', ' ++ <str>max(cities),
  'Average population: ' ++ <str>math::mean(cities),
  'At least one city has more than 5 million people: ' ++ <str>any(cities > 5000000),
  'Standard deviation: ' ++ <str>math::stddev(cities)
);

This used quite a few functions:

• count() to count the number of items,

• all() to return {true} if all items match and {false} otherwise,

• sum() to add them all together,

• max() to give the highest value,

• min() to give the lowest one,

• math::mean() to give the average,

• any() to return {true} if any item matches and {false} otherwise, and

• math::stddev() for the standard deviation.

The output also makes it clear how they work:

{
  (
    'Number of cities: 5',
    'All cities have more than 50,000 people: false',
    'Total population: 4156229',
    'Smallest and largest population: 9100, 3500000',
    'Average population: 831245.8',
    'At least one city has more than 5 million people: false',
    'Standard deviation: 1500876.8248',
  ),
}

any(), all() and count() are particularly useful in operations to give you an idea of your data.

Importing modules with WITH

You can use the keyword WITH to import modules too. In the example above we used two functions from EdgeDB’s math module: math::mean() and math::stddev(). Just writing mean() and stddev() would produce this error:

ERROR: InvalidReferenceError: function 'mean' does not exist

If you don’t want to write the module name every time you can just import the module after WITH. Let’s slip that into the query we just used. See if you can see what’s changed:

WITH cities := City.population,
  MODULE math
SELECT (
  'Number of cities: ' ++ <str>count(cities),
  'All cities have more than 50,000 people: ' ++ <str>all(cities > 50000),
  'Total population: ' ++ <str>sum(cities),
  'Smallest and largest population: ' ++ <str>min(cities) ++ ', ' ++ <str>max(cities),
  'Average population: ' ++ <str>mean(cities),
  'At least one city has more than 5 million people: ' ++ <str>any(cities > 5000000),
  'Standard deviation: ' ++ <str>stddev(cities)
);

The output is the same, but we added an import of the math module, letting us just write mean() and stddev().

You can also use AS to rename a module (well, to alias a module) in the same way that you can rename a type. So this will work too:

WITH M AS MODULE math,
SELECT M::mean(City.population);

That gives us the mean: {831245.8}.

Some more computables for names

We saw in this chapter that Dr. Seward asked his old teacher Dr. Van Helsing to come and help Lucy. Here is how Dr. Van Helsing began his letter to say that he was coming:

Letter, Abraham Van Helsing, M. D., D. Ph., D. Lit., etc., etc., to Dr. Seward.

“2 September.

“My good Friend,—
“When I have received your letter I am already coming to you.

The Abraham Van Helsing, M. D., D. Ph., D. Lit., etc., etc. part is interesting. This might be a good time to think about more about the name property inside our Person type. Right now our name property is just a single string, but we have people with different types of names, in this order:

Title | First name | Last name | Degree

So there is ‘Count Dracula’ (title and name), ‘Dr. Seward’ (title and name), ‘Dr. Abraham Van Helsing, M.D, Ph. D. Lit.’ (title + first name + last name + degrees), and so on.

That would lead us to think that we should have titles like first_name, last_name, title etc. and then join them together using a computable. But then again, not every character has these exact four parts to their name. Some others that don’t are ‘Woman 1’ and ‘The Innkeeper’, and our game would certainly have a lot more of these. So it’s probably not a good idea to get rid of name or always build names from separate parts. But in our game we might have characters writing letters or talking to each other, and they will have to use things like titles and degrees.

We could try a middle of the road approach instead. We’ll keep name, and add some properties to Person:

property title -> str;
property degrees -> str;
property conversational_name := .title ++ ' ' ++ .name IF EXISTS .title ELSE .name;
property pen_name := .name ++ ', ' ++ .degrees IF EXISTS .degrees ELSE .name;

We could try to do something fancier with degrees by making it an array<str> for each degree, but our game probably doesn’t need that much precision. We are just using this for our conversation engine.

Now it’s time to insert Van Helsing:

INSERT NPC {
  name := 'Abraham Van Helsing',
  title := 'Dr.',
  degrees := 'M.D., Ph. D. Lit., etc.'
};

Now we can make use of these properties to liven up our conversation engine in the game. For example:

WITH helsing := (SELECT NPC filter .name ILIKE '%helsing%')
SELECT (
  'There goes ' ++ helsing.name ++ '.',
  'I say! Are you ' ++ helsing.conversational_name ++ '?',
  'Letter from ' ++ helsing.pen_name ++ ',\n\tI am sorry to say that I bring bad news about Lucy.'
);

By the way, the \n inside the string creates a new line, while \t moves it one tab to the right.

This gives us:

{
  (
    'There goes Abraham Van Helsing.',
    'I say! Are you Dr. Abraham Van Helsing?',
    'Letter from Abraham Van Helsing, M.D., Ph. D. Lit., etc.,
        I am sorry to say that I bring bad news about Lucy.',
  ),
}

In a standard database with users it’s much simpler: get users to enter their first names, last names etc. and make each one a property.

Other escape characters and raw strings

Besides \n and \t there are quite a few other escape characters - you can see the complete list here. Some are rare but hexadecimal with \x is a good example of one that might be useful.

If you want to ignore escape characters, put an r in front of the quote. Let’s try it with the example above. Only the last part has an r:

WITH helsing := (SELECT NPC filter .name ILIKE '%helsing%')
SELECT (
  'There goes ' ++ helsing.name ++ '.',
  'I say! Are you ' ++ helsing.conversational_name ++ '?',
  'Letter from ' ++ helsing.pen_name ++ r',\n\tI am sorry to say that I bring bad news about Lucy.'
);

Now we get:

{
  (
    'There goes Abraham Van Helsing.',
    'I say! Are you Dr. Abraham Van Helsing?',
    'Letter from Abraham Van Helsing, M.D., Ph. D. Lit., etc.\n\tI am sorry to say that I bring bad news about Lucy.',
  ),
}

Finally, there is a raw string literal that uses $$ on each side. Anything inside this will ignore any and all quotation marks, so you won’t have to worry about the string ending in the middle. Here’s one example with a bunch of single and double quotes inside:

SELECT $$ "Dr. Van Helsing would like to tell "them" about "vampires" and how to "kill" them, but he'd sound crazy." $$;

Without the $$ it will look like four separate strings with three unknown keywords between them, and will generate an error.

All the scalar types

You now have an understanding of all the EdgeDB scalar types. Summed up, the are: int16, int32, int64, float32, float64, bigint, decimal, sequence, str, bool, datetime, duration, cal::local_datetime, cal::local_date, cal::local_time, uuid, json, and enum. You can see the documentation for them here.

UNLESS CONFLICT ON + ELSE + UPDATE

We put an exclusive constraint on name so that we won’t be able to have two characters with the same name. The idea is that someone might see a character in the book and insert it, and then someone else would try to do the same. So this character named Johnny will work:

INSERT NPC {
  name := 'Johnny'
};

But if we try again we will get this error: ERROR: ConstraintViolationError: name violates exclusivity constraint

But sometimes just generating an error isn’t enough - maybe we want something else to happen instead of just giving up. This is where UNLESS CONFLICT ON comes in, followed by an ELSE to explain what to do. UNLESS CONFLICT ON is probably easier to explain through an example. Here’s one that shows what we can do to either insert a City with its population, and to UPDATE the population if it already exists in the database.

Munich had a population of 230,023 in 1880, and five years later it was 261,023. So let’s imagine we are updating the City data and some cities might exist, while others might not. The INSERT will look like this:

INSERT City {
  name := 'Munich',
  population := 261023,
} UNLESS CONFLICT ON .name
ELSE (
  UPDATE City
  SET {
    population := 261023,
  }
);

Let’s look at it step by step:

First a normal insert:

INSERT NPC {
  name := 'Munich'
}

But there might be a City there already so it might not work, so we add UNLESS CONFLICT ON .name. Then follow it with an ELSE to give instructions on what to do.

But here’s the important part: we don’t write ELSE INSERT, because we are already in the middle of an INSERT. What we write instead is UPDATE for the type we are inserting, so UPDATE City. We are basically taking the failed data from the insert and updating it to try again. So we’ll do this instead:

ELSE (
  UPDATE City
  SET {
    population := 261023
  }
);

With this, we are guaranteed to get a City object called Munich with a population of 261,023, whether it already exists in the database or not.

Here is all our code so far up to Chapter 10.

1. Try inserting two NPC types in one insert with the following name, first_appearance and last_appearance information.

   {('Jimmy the Bartender', '1887-09-10', '1887-09-11'), ('Some friend of Jonathan Harker', '1887-07-08', '1887-07-09')}

   Show answer

2. Here are two more NPCs to insert, except the last one has an empty set (she’s not dead). What problem are we going to have?

   {('Dracula\'s Castle visitor', '1887-09-10', '1887-09-11'), ('Old lady from Bistritz', '1887-05-08', {})}

   Show answer

3. How would you order the Person types by last letter of their names?

   Show answer

4. Try inserting an NPC with the name ''. Now how would you do the same query in question 3?

   Hint: the length of '' is 0, which may be a problem.

   Show answer

5. Dr. Van Helsing has a list of MinorVampires with their names and strengths. We already have some MinorVampires in the database. How would you INSERT them while making sure to UPDATE if the object is already there?

   Show answer

Up next: Will they believe Van Helsing when he tells them the truth?