It's clear our tastes in critical API details differ, and it'll also take me at least a month or two for enough prototyping with Cassandra, Neo4j (and learning the tiniest bit about their wide column and graph paradigms), SQLite, and PostgreSQL to answer many of my own outstanding questions, as well as ones for a potential common user level API.
Take the time you need, and what you find out I will cheerfully incorporate into the pre-pre. No hurry. If we cannot agree, we cannot; but I see no reason to assume that we will not agree a priori. I think you are over-pessimistic. "Before debate we only have prejudices, not true opinions." —Hannah Arendt (summary)
Data transformations, how to specify and implement are a big issue, I think a much bigger issue for me when SQLite only has NULL, INTEGER, REAL (floating point), TEXT, and BLOB, and doesn't enforce them at all (modulo TEXT having a ~2,000 character limit??).
TL;DR I have serious doubts about our trying to force a common user level API as a standard. It risks generating friction fatal to my effort.
There is no problem with having other APIs that extend it in different libraries, of course.
John Cowan
http://vrici.lojban.org/~cowan xxxxxx@ccil.orgWe want more school houses and less jails; more books and less arsenals;
more learning and less vice; more constant work and less crime; more
leisure and less greed; more justice and less revenge; in fact, more of
the opportunities to cultivate our better natures. --Samuel Gompers