We Can Do Better Than SQL • Hacker News Board

Re: We Can Do Better Than SQL

#81

Post by bjt » Tue, Aug 11, 2020, 5:37 AM UTC

jerrya wrote: post #15

I can see the improvement of their EdgeQL over SQL... But (as I haven't read of their blog posts) I am a bit more reluctant about the whole thing when they describe it as an ORM. Can we leave the ORM and take the query language and implement this as a Postgres extension?

Exactly my question. If improving on SQL also means that I have to throw out all the maturity of Postgres, it's very unlikely to happen.

But if you can define a new query language that can be implemented by existing relational DBs, you might actually have a shot at displacing SQL.

Re: We Can Do Better Than SQL

#82

Post by julochrobak » Tue, Aug 11, 2020, 5:38 AM UTC

I am a big fan of a relational model. SQL itself is OK but far from great. So, I wish you a lot of success!

I was part of a similar attempt - building a better "SQL" and relational DB. This was roughly 8 years a go. You can have a look at our GitHub Projects or look at some further links and may be you get inspired :)

* http://bandilab.github.io/ - introduction to the bandicoot project

* https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Bandicoot/ - presentation of the Bandicoot language on

* https://github.com/ostap/comp - another interesting attempt, a query language based on a list comprehension

Re: We Can Do Better Than SQL

#83

Post by bjo590 » Tue, Aug 11, 2020, 5:42 AM UTC

dman wrote: post #70

One word of caution to those trying to improve on SQL - for the many users of SQL, technology is a secondary aspect of their jobs. Hence any replacement runs into the issue that many of its core users do not have the bandwidth to spend significant effort on learning another querying language. I will cheer everyone who tries to displace SQL, because I do think it needs to be displaced but would also want to caution su…

I often think that a great way to displace SQL would be to create a language that compiles to SQL similar to how TypeScript compiles to Javascript.

Re: We Can Do Better Than SQL

#84

Post by tqi » Tue, Aug 11, 2020, 5:43 AM UTC

It's pretty arrogant to complain about the syntax being inconsistent across versions and databases and then present your own weird offshoot, as if every other version wasn't introduced for the exact same reason with the exact same lofty delusions of grandeur...

SQL is messy because describing the underlying data relationships are messy. The orthogonality example is a great illustration of this. What exactly should the result be if there are multiple dept heads? Should the result rows be duplicated? It's not clear how edgeQl would handle either (their edgQl orthogonality examples were constructed to only have result per sub query), but it seems like they would be kept together as sets. In that case, the result set is no longer a table, it's a dataframe, which is a useful data structure but is also not what relational databases do.

Re: We Can Do Better Than SQL

#85

Post by xiaodai » Tue, Aug 11, 2020, 5:44 AM UTC

How do you even do Select col from table group by grp in EdgeQL?

Re: We Can Do Better Than SQL

#86

Post by xiaodai » Tue, Aug 11, 2020, 5:44 AM UTC

tqi wrote: post #84

It's pretty arrogant to complain about the syntax being inconsistent across versions and databases and then present your own weird offshoot, as if every other version wasn't introduced for the exact same reason with the exact same lofty delusions of grandeur... SQL is messy because describing the underlying data relationships are messy. The orthogonality example is a great illustration of this. What exactly should th…

yeah the edgeql syntax just looks messy and the doc doesn't even explain how to do a group by

Re: We Can Do Better Than SQL

#87

Post by JoshuaDavid » Tue, Aug 11, 2020, 5:45 AM UTC

ckocagil wrote: post #32

I'm not impressed for two reasons: 1. Anyone striving to build a better SQL should make a comprehensive list of common (but difficult!) database tasks for OLTP and OLAP workloads. This will expose the weakness of their language. SQL has had 50 years and myriads of improvements to cover all these common cases. This is not a fair fight, so come prepared. 2. It's not enough to be just "better than SQL" to replace it. SQ…

Alternatively you can make a compiler from sql to your alternative, which would make it relatively easy to get the "I just want a familiar thing that works" people on board.

Re: We Can Do Better Than SQL

#88

Post by xiaodai » Tue, Aug 11, 2020, 5:47 AM UTC

nealabq wrote: post #47

nealabq wrote: post #25

QUEL ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUEL_query_languages ), the original query-language for Ingres, was more orthogonal and consistent than SQL. But IBM decided SQL was more business friendly. Who can argue with that. And before that there was ALPHA. From https://www.labouseur.com/courses/db/s2-Remembering-Codd-2.p... : "Ted [Codd] also saw the potential of using predicate logic as a foundation for a database langua…

Ted Codd designed the Relational Calculus as a clean relational-query language. It looks mathematical (scary?) and a little like a set-comprehension. But I think the big mistake is its use of non-ascii chars like ∃ ∈ ∀. Here's an example from http://arwan.lecture.ub.ac.id/files/2013/10/4.-relationalcal... : SQL: SELECT DISTINCT F.Name FROM FACULTY F WHERE NOT EXISTS (SELECT * FROM CLASS C WHERE F.Id=C.InstructorId AN…

∃ ∈ ∀. quite natural to me as a pure math grad

there exists, in, for all

Re: We Can Do Better Than SQL

#89

Post by enjo » Tue, Aug 11, 2020, 5:49 AM UTC

tqi wrote: post #84

It's pretty arrogant to complain about the syntax being inconsistent across versions and databases and then present your own weird offshoot, as if every other version wasn't introduced for the exact same reason with the exact same lofty delusions of grandeur... SQL is messy because describing the underlying data relationships are messy. The orthogonality example is a great illustration of this. What exactly should th…

XKCD’s comic on competing standards feels appropriate here:

https://xkcd.com/927/

Re: We Can Do Better Than SQL

#90

Post by bjo590 » Tue, Aug 11, 2020, 5:50 AM UTC

simonbarker87 wrote: post #64

exabrial wrote: post #36

Honestly I think SQL is pretty easy. I love it. I can teach the basics to a new person in minutes. You know what we could do better at? Crappy explains from database engines. Crappy rate limiting capabilities. Poor feedback on keep cache pipelines fed during scans. Poor feedback on column size effects on reading stripes from disk and size alignments between the filesystem and database.

Your brain must work different to mine. SQL is by far the hardest tool I use. I’ve used all the main languages from asm up to js for real work and nothing breaks my brain like SQL. I use it daily in a business that is heavy on SPs and while I get by and am improving the jump from inner joins and selects to CTEs and the other wizardry is massive. I want to be better at SQL but so many problems I hit up against and thi…

> I want to be better at SQL but so many problems I hit up against and think “well that’s a 2 minute job in js/swift/php”

The thing about SQL is that it's the fastest way to read&write data in a relational database. Maybe writing the code is faster in js/swift/php, but the code will run faster in SQL. If you need to do something to 100M pieces of data you can do a lot worse than SQL.