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We Can Do Better Than SQL

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Re: We Can Do Better Than SQL

#151

Post by dagss »

paulhodge wrote: post #52
gregjor wrote: post #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.

It's 2020 not 1995. There are already lots of good, production-ready SQL alternatives out there. There's full-fledged businesses that have zero lines of SQL.

What are good production ready alternatives for SQL? (That are still relational and doesn't make you rewrite half of the database logic again in each new backend you make -- not talking about key/value stores)

Re: We Can Do Better Than SQL

#153

Post by mszcz »

bjo590 wrote: post #93

Am I the only full stack dev that likes SQL? SQL is an incredibly expressive and flexible way to read, store, and update data. It's ubiquitous, so the SQL skills I learned six jobs and three industries ago are still relevant and useful to me today. Relational Databases and SQL are heavy lifters that I often relay upon to build projects and get things done.

Seconded. Every language has it's use and quirks. Does SQL get tricky in tricky situations? Sure. But what doesn't.

This piece reads like Joey being unable to open a carton of milk [1], "there's gotta be a better way!".

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwROPN3Fir8

Re: We Can Do Better Than SQL

#154

Post by haspok »

I think it's a mistake to design a language in 2020 with C-style curly bracket syntax.

It just looks like line noise compared to SQL, or whitespace significant languages.

Re: We Can Do Better Than SQL

#155

Post by hnarn »

Very few people truly understand databases, and therefore very few people truly understand SQL. I would be suspicious of any “SQL replacement” that didn’t come from someone with many, many years in the field.

Re: We Can Do Better Than SQL

#156

Post by AmericanChopper »

Akronymus wrote: post #145
AmericanChopper wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The relational model can _usually_ save the day here, without a huge amount of effort. SQL certainly has its share of anti-patterns and footguns. But most of the awful SQL I’ve seen over my career hasn’t come from poor mastery of SQL, it’s come from poorly normalized schemas. If you have a properly normalized schema, then you can do a huge amount with very simple SQL. When it’s poorly normalized, you end up with all…

>footguns Ran into one recently. Where a table was joined either to one or the other table, based on if a value was null in the first one. This was fine, until we added a where clause to a, through multiple joins, base table for both options. This tanked the performance >1000x.[1] If we just returned the value it had basically no impact. We tried solving it with using the result set as a base for a select where we di…

Imo, polymorphic associations are one of the key areas that the relational model in general struggles. You can do them in most RDBMS, but they’re always a bit janky. Even when you’re just modelling your schema, you really have to think quite hard about it, and you’ll really struggle to preserve simplicity.

Re: We Can Do Better Than SQL

#157

Post by IshKebab »

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…

I don't see how that makes them arrogant. SQL's implementation inconsistencies are a real problem. Their query language doesn't claim to be another version of SQL - it's clearly very different.

Also that is only one of the things they are hoping to fix. It sounds like you're saying "We have 5 variants of SQL already so nobody is allowed to write any other database query languages ever. We must use SQL forever." which is stupid.

Re: We Can Do Better Than SQL

#158

Post by lmm »

Akronymus wrote: post #146
lmm wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's circular reasoning though. Why do you want your data to be in a relational database? Particularly if you're not actually using its features (I don't think I've ever seen a web application that actually got any value out of database-level transactions, for example). A different kind of datastore could offer you better performance and easier querying.

I love SQL for making it possible to almost trivially enforce most business rules. Such as: You can only use one of the in another table specified values in this field.

I struggle to understand this viewpoint. In my experience business rules are harder to express in SQL than in practically any first-class programming language. "Is this value one of this list of values" - whether that list is hardcoded or dynamically obtained - is completely trivial.

(Of course if you apply some double standard where editing your "source code" requires multiple approvals whereas changing your "database" may be done at will in production then you'll find SQL logic easier to adjust, but that's a reflection of your policies rather than any fundamental reality.)

Re: We Can Do Better Than SQL

#159

Post by etxm »

bjo590 wrote: post #93

Am I the only full stack dev that likes SQL? SQL is an incredibly expressive and flexible way to read, store, and update data. It's ubiquitous, so the SQL skills I learned six jobs and three industries ago are still relevant and useful to me today. Relational Databases and SQL are heavy lifters that I often relay upon to build projects and get things done.

Team SQL. There have been few data models Ive encountered that I couldn’t express with some functionality of Postgres.

Re: We Can Do Better Than SQL

#160

Post by freerider »

steve_adams_86 wrote: post #100
bjo590 wrote: post #93

Am I the only full stack dev that likes SQL? SQL is an incredibly expressive and flexible way to read, store, and update data. It's ubiquitous, so the SQL skills I learned six jobs and three industries ago are still relevant and useful to me today. Relational Databases and SQL are heavy lifters that I often relay upon to build projects and get things done.

The work I do lately tends to be missing an sql layer and yes, I miss it a lot. I loved organizing my data at that layer and having such powerful ways to query it. It felt like I could eternally find ways to optimize it, and I really enjoyed learning year after year. Lately I use nosql for very light data and otherwise our API outputs heavily cached and extremely simple data. Adding a database as a middleman wouldn’t…

When I started at a company there were using MFC in windows and started transactions in a CDialog::OnOK().

Me and my companion moved everything to stored procedures. Now every IT-department says that the product is VERY stable.

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