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We Can Do Better Than SQL

edgedb.com

1–10 of 466 posts

Re: We Can Do Better Than SQL

#2
Would be nice, but bazillions of lines of SQL at the core of almost every business system make this as likely as “We can do better than five fingers.”

The article does nicely illustrate many of the well-known shortcomings of SQL. Chris Date and Hugh Darwen unsuccessfully tried to fix SQL with Tutorial D. Never heard of it? Exactly.

Re: We Can Do Better Than SQL

#3
Started reading believing the article would be utter nonsense but by the end was convinced they might be onto something. My hat goes off to them if they pull this off. It will take a lot to push SQL out of its stronghold.

Re: We Can Do Better Than SQL

#5
People have a love/hate relation with SQL. I think most software engineers are OK with it, some even find it a curious case to tumble down the rabbit hole of multiple JOINs or inner SELECTs.

But for most people out there who simply want to poke at their business data, SQL, or this article's stated solution - EdgeQL are all pains in the wrong places. If you are making the life of engineers a bit easier, then you have to think of the millions of My/Pg SQL installations.

If you want to make the larger audiences' life easier (the business people who need insights), then you need to think outside of SQL altogether.

Re: We Can Do Better Than SQL

#7
SQL is definitely not perfect but it's supported everywhere and integrates with everything, so you can augment it with other languages. That fact makes a lot of the critiques sort of moot.

Re: We Can Do Better Than SQL

#9
I was looking around yesterday to find alternatives to SQL and found nothing. Everything is in this ridiculous table-based model, the queries of which are complicated and error-prone.

It’s heresy to criticize SQL these days or even suggest that DBs could be easier and more robust. I envision a future DB language that offers perfect ease and safety with queries the way Rust has shown us that the memory unsafeness of C was voluntary all along.

Re: We Can Do Better Than SQL

#10
> The NoSQL movement was born, in part, out of the frustration with the perceived stagnation and inadequacy of SQL databases.

I would dispute this. The antecedents of NoSQL were the parallel programming models of HPC. They weren’t specifically excluding SQL, and NoSQL was a term that was invented after the fact.

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