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A Critique of SQL, 40 Years Later

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Re: A Critique of SQL, 40 Years Later

#11

Post by dominotw »

eatonphil wrote: post #9
dominotw wrote: post #3

SQL is having somewhat of a moment in the bigdata world, thanks in part to 'modern datastack' and new age datawarehouses like snowflake,bigquery. However there are a lot of pushback from 'traditional' dataengineers who were trained on spark/scala. Its bit of hardsell to go from a highly typed language to a free for all text based logic. I think the following is needed for sql to be finally accepted as 'serious' conte…

> I think the following is needed for sql to be finally accepted as 'serious' contender. Whatever way you slice it, SQL is one of the most used languages today [0]. [0] https://spectrum.ieee.org/top-programming-languages-2022

right. I get lots of pushback for using sql at my clients. They just defeat me with one single point. "where are your unit tests" :D

Re: A Critique of SQL, 40 Years Later

#12

Post by webmobdev »

Cockbrand wrote: post #4

While all the criticism is probably correct, and SQL definitely shows its age, it's still very much good enough for pretty much all its current applications. Also, SQL's basics are very easy to learn. These aspects make it very hard to imagine a language that might gain enough traction to actually replace SQL in a foreseeable future.

Agreed - my experience with non-SQL tech (ORMs) with Django and ASP.net MVC made me really appreciate SQL so much. Most of the time I felt everything would be so much easier using raw SQL instead of dealing with model objects. It also felt like in their quest to replace SQL and make things "simpler" they were recreating some db features again.

Re: A Critique of SQL, 40 Years Later

#13

Post by thomas536 »

I once read an article about SQL and how reordering the sections of a query would make it more ergonomic for users (iirc things like specifying what you want first and then how to present it last, more like a pipeline). I searched many times over the years but have not been able to find it again.

Re: A Critique of SQL, 40 Years Later

#14

Post by toto444 »

exabrial wrote: post #10

The only thing that affects my daily life with SQL is that FROM should be before the SELECT keyword. This would _greatly_ improve type-ahead support in SQL IDEs. Nothing is perfect, but that is really the main beef. Another commentor already nailed having a LIMIT WITH ERROR clause to be specified on UPDATE,DELETE statements and explicitly throw an error otherwise. SQL is on of my favorite tools to use and I don't see…

Every time SQL is mentioned on HN someone comes to complain about FROM coming after SELECT. I use SQL every day and not a single time have I found reason to complain about it. Can you give a bit more detail about what's wrong with it being like it is ?

EDIT : thanks all for your reply. I now understand that it is an IDE related thing not something fundamental to the language.

Re: A Critique of SQL, 40 Years Later

#15

Post by fatherzine »

vendiddy wrote: post #5
dominotw wrote: post #3

SQL is having somewhat of a moment in the bigdata world, thanks in part to 'modern datastack' and new age datawarehouses like snowflake,bigquery. However there are a lot of pushback from 'traditional' dataengineers who were trained on spark/scala. Its bit of hardsell to go from a highly typed language to a free for all text based logic. I think the following is needed for sql to be finally accepted as 'serious' conte…

I think these are great suggestions. It seems like you're suggesting that someone could design a functional-style programming language that compiles to SQL. 2 & 3 are my biggest pain points. I can't just extract functions like I can with a regular programming language. Instead, SQL queries get increasingly complex with no great tools to manage that. For 3, products like https://materialize.com/ look interesting for b…

"someone could design a functional-style programming language that compiles to SQL". See e.g. R dplyr

Re: A Critique of SQL, 40 Years Later

#16

Post by ericHosick »

dominotw wrote: post #11
eatonphil wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think the following is needed for sql to be finally accepted as 'serious' contender. Whatever way you slice it, SQL is one of the most used languages today [0]. [0] https://spectrum.ieee.org/top-programming-languages-2022

right. I get lots of pushback for using sql at my clients. They just defeat me with one single point. "where are your unit tests" :D

> where are your unit tests

I do unit testing in SQL, and something I'm working on and use extensively myself (https://www.npmjs.com/package/sql-watch) indirectly supports unit tests.

There are also SQL testing frameworks available.

Re: A Critique of SQL, 40 Years Later

#17

Post by gibsonf1 »

I think the issue isn't SQL, but the table paradigm for storing data. Humans do not store data in separate tables that need joining, they store data in a fully connected graph (hyper-graph). Its about relationships and hierarchies - the graph allows incredibly fast hierarchical reasoning, as most things involve hierarchical reasoning. The relational table, and Sql by correlation, are terrible at the human approach to working with data especially hierarchies.

Re: A Critique of SQL, 40 Years Later

#18

Post by taeric »

exabrial wrote: post #10

The only thing that affects my daily life with SQL is that FROM should be before the SELECT keyword. This would _greatly_ improve type-ahead support in SQL IDEs. Nothing is perfect, but that is really the main beef. Another commentor already nailed having a LIMIT WITH ERROR clause to be specified on UPDATE,DELETE statements and explicitly throw an error otherwise. SQL is on of my favorite tools to use and I don't see…

You could improve type ahead by just pouring effort into the IDE. Especially with the amount of resources we have nowadays. Easy enough to have basic typeahead on basically all possible columns when writing the select, and then you could use the columns as a filter on the tables during auto complete.

In general, this isn't done. But I don't see any technical reason it can't be done.

Re: A Critique of SQL, 40 Years Later

#19

Post by taeric »

ericHosick wrote: post #16
dominotw wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

right. I get lots of pushback for using sql at my clients. They just defeat me with one single point. "where are your unit tests" :D

> where are your unit tests I do unit testing in SQL, and something I'm working on and use extensively myself ( https://www.npmjs.com/package/sql-watch ) indirectly supports unit tests. There are also SQL testing frameworks available.

I was going to say the same. With the prevalence of embedded databases, and how cheap it is to stand up a container with non-embedded options, build time testing of queries has never been easier.

Re: A Critique of SQL, 40 Years Later

#20

Post by [deleted] »

toto444 wrote: post #14
exabrial wrote: post #10

The only thing that affects my daily life with SQL is that FROM should be before the SELECT keyword. This would _greatly_ improve type-ahead support in SQL IDEs. Nothing is perfect, but that is really the main beef. Another commentor already nailed having a LIMIT WITH ERROR clause to be specified on UPDATE,DELETE statements and explicitly throw an error otherwise. SQL is on of my favorite tools to use and I don't see…

Every time SQL is mentioned on HN someone comes to complain about FROM coming after SELECT. I use SQL every day and not a single time have I found reason to complain about it. Can you give a bit more detail about what's wrong with it being like it is ? EDIT : thanks all for your reply. I now understand that it is an IDE related thing not something fundamental to the language.

[deleted]
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