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One on one with Bonnie Baker

In the last "Programmers Only" column , Bonnie Baker posed the question, "What [is] the meaning of the term 'non-sargable'?" Reader Charley Bontempo ventures some background on the origins of the word.

Stage 1 or Data Manager query processing was originally performed by the RSS (Research Storage System), so named by the System R research folks. The DB2 folks changed the name soon after the product release. I believe "sargable" is a contraction of "search arguable." I never got (or sought) an explanation of why they decided to contract and use the latter term to label those predicates that would be handled by the RSS, closest to where the data is stored. I suppose an analogy is "timeron," which is a contraction of "timer on" to specify a unit of query processing/search time, which the research folks also invented for System R. (They were and still are a great group!).

Thanks for the first-rate articles; I don't find many of such high quality around these days.

Charley Bontempo
Yorktown Hgts., NY

Bonnie Baker responds:

Thanks for the historical information, Charley. I had been told that "sargable" was a IBM-made-up contraction of sorts for "search-argumentable" but had not heard the origin for "timeron". I usually tell folks that the only thing the timeron is good for is picking lottery numbers. Also, thanks for the kind words about the column.

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