Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

We Can Do Better Than SQL

edgedb.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–300 of 466 posts

Re: We Can Do Better Than SQL

#291

Post by goto11 »

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…

> SQL is messy because describing the underlying data relationships are messy.

No, the relational model is beautiful and consistent! SQL is messy because the syntax is not consistent and elegantly composable. It could have those properties and still present the same underlying data relationships.

See Linq in C# as an example for how a more composable query syntax can expose the same data model.

For example in Linq you can chain arbitrary many select/join/where/group by in arbitrary order. In SQL you need nested subqueries to achieve the same which is a much more convoluted syntax.

Re: We Can Do Better Than SQL

#292

Post by jimbokun »

nicoburns wrote: post #218
quickthrower2 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love SQL. I'd love someone to make it better for complex queries. Have you seen the enterprise SQL monstrosities. Why do we have ORMs if SQL is perfect?

Completely agree. For example, why isn't there functionality to define aliases for complex expressions and then reuse those through a query. Simple query-local SQL functions would be nice too. I'd love to see a "SQL-like" language that compiles down to SQL itself, much like Babel or TypeScript in the JavaScript world. I think the tricky thing is that there is no single SQL target.

> I think the tricky thing is that there is no single SQL target.

So the jquery of SQL, then.

Re: We Can Do Better Than SQL

#293

Post by jimbokun »

tsimionescu wrote: post #147
quickthrower2 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love SQL. I'd love someone to make it better for complex queries. Have you seen the enterprise SQL monstrosities. Why do we have ORMs if SQL is perfect?

We have ORMs because our programming languages object models are not relational, they are hierarchical - from C to Haskell, everyone goes for highly non-relational data representations. So, when we interact with a relational DB we need some kind of layer to map between the world of relations in the DB and the world of objects in our program.

I would say they're not even hierarchical in many cases, but an unconstrained graph.

Re: We Can Do Better Than SQL

#294

Post by sanderjd »

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.

No, you're right, SQL is awesome. I mean, the syntax itself is pretty creaky, but it doesn't matter, the power to declaratively query structured data is the key. Everything that provides that power is awesome; SQL is just at the top of that heap in the breadth of its utility.

Re: We Can Do Better Than SQL

#295

Post by randomdata »

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.

I like relational algebra. I dislike SQL. It harkens from a similar era as COBOL, and I dislike COBOL for procedural applications for the same reason. We've learned a lot about language design over the years and it is a shame that we've put very little effort into adopting new languages to address this particular problem space.

Re: We Can Do Better Than SQL

#296

Post by dahfizz »

g5becks wrote: post #282
kd5bjo wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So, to summarize: I never actually heard a compelling general theory of good syntax. I started to think along these lines when I got serious about learning a foreign language. Humans appear to have some innate language ability that’s reflected, among other things, in commonalities between disparate languages. As far as I can tell, there’s been no serious effort to design a computer language to take advantage of thi…

Though I program in languages that most follow the obj.method(args) pattern, I really prefer the args |> function |> function pattern and I wish it was the norm in every programming language.

In what language is that used? It reminds me of pipes in bash. I can see it being useful in circumstances where you have lots of function calls and fewer arguments (just like pipes), but I think it would look really ugly and hard to parse with a long arg list.

Re: We Can Do Better Than SQL

#297

Post by jimbokun »

AmericanChopper wrote: post #136
mnsc wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think one of the challenges with sql is that beginner developers can create naive sql queries that "work" but are extremely complicated for the optimizer to "get right". So in some cases (talking from own experience) the developer can, with the use of hints, "be better" than the optimizer when the problem all along was the overall structure of the query. Edit: don't do it

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…

> Data structures and concurrency control is just fundamentally useful computer science, but for some reason it seems to be a topic a lot of people don’t pay enough attention too.

Because of the endless articles and comments saying basic computer science knowledge "isn't really needed" for the majority of programming jobs.

Re: We Can Do Better Than SQL

#298

Post by randomdata »

igeligel_dev wrote: post #173
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.

Same for me. I love it. I always avoided the NoSQL things so far since the use-case is mostly unstructured data in comparison to normal SQL databases. I think what most engineers struggle with is just thinking of rows and columns as data. It is a separate thing to create schemas, work with them, inserting data, manipulating data and reading data. These are all different skills. Creating the proper queries is like lea…

It sounds like you are more in love with relational algebra than SQL itself. Relational algebra is sound mathematics, but SQL used to express those ideas is horribly old and outdated. We have learned a lot about language design in the half century since its inception. We can do better.

Re: We Can Do Better Than SQL

#299

Post by jimbokun »

Flimm wrote: post #194

Yes, SQL has flaws, and the article forgot to mention one of them: you need to build a string to build an SQL query, rather than a more structured object, leading to flaws like SQL injection vulnerabilities, and difficulties adjusting the query. Let's say you're building a CRUD app with search and filtering capabilities. Unless you are using an ORM (which has problems of its own), you might be tempted to build the SQ…

Isn't the solution a "query builder" pattern for your preferred programming language, that generates a SQL string and sends that to the database?

Re: We Can Do Better Than SQL

#300

Post by spo81rty »

I love SQL. I HATE using Elasticsearch because it doesn't support SQL. If you ever used Elasticsearch, you know exactly the nightmares I am talking about.

Products support SQL because everyone knows it and it works, regardless if it isn't perfect. Trying to create a new version of SQL is ruining your capability to have millions of trained users that already know how to use your product.

Post reply on HN