It's not you, it's SQL

Article author here -- DuckDB is indeed cool.

Another interesting bit of work in this space is LINQ on the microsoft side of things. And even list comprehensions end up having a scanning/summing language kind of feel to them that would be interesting to see translated into a new database query language.

Article author here.

> It may actually be fine to just require everything to be typescript, but the idea that you'd require your application be written in the same language as your data store, and thus implement a different data store for each language you might want to write an app in (and not share between languages)... would formerly be thought of as pretty ridiculous?

The vision is definitely aspirational, and is reflecting on the fact that JS/TS is becoming overwhelmingly the most popular language for projects. With things like React Native, for many teams even mobile apps are taken care of all on one language.

There will obviously always be apps written in other languages, and in those cases, a bit more type mapping will be necessary, because (for now) Convex functions are always side-effect free, automatically cached JS/TS running in a very particular runtime. But we'll work on making that translation as smooth as possible in our client libraries.

We have a Python client library out now ( https://pypi.org/project/convex/ ) and a Rust one coming soon, just to keep us honest in this respect.

> I guess we'll see if Convex can get popular enough to spawn lots of "what I wish I knew about convex a year ago" and "Goodbye Convex, hello Postgresql" posts...

Well, that's the dream, isn't it?

Not just that, but presenting hierarchical as if it isn't a pre-SQL thing that Codd's model was attempting to fix and displace (and succeeded beyond his wildest dreams at doing so, I'd guess).

I see. So, when you say "the application and database types are automatically equivalent because the entire data pipeline from frontend to database uses the same exact types and definitions", can that apply somehow to python and rust client libraries too?

What about "all write operations on the database are done in embedded functions"? For the python and rust client libraries, do you write these embedded functions in python or rust, or typescript/JS? Do you effectively have to write a specialized update procedure in typescript for every update you want to do? This starts seeming harder to spin as an advantage if you aren't typescript in the first place. ("A custom stored procedure required for every update" is actually not something anyone's been looking for!)

The OP arguments seem to me to be written assuming you are writing typescript in your app, it's unclear to me how the advantages you claim translate if you are not -- such that I figured the product was actually only for typescript apps! It would be interesting to see a rewrite of it that explicitly targets those writing in, say, python or rust.

I mean... yeah MongoDB got a lot of hate, but I think the broader point is that it was one of the first technologies to popularize the domain of NoSQL. No one knew how to use it properly; so we adapted SQL-like schema design, and when it became obvious that didn't work well the hate started spilling over to the first technology to arrive at the party.

The elephant in the room is, I suppose, that the modern internet literally would not be possible without NoSQL. It may be possible without SQL; that seems likely to me. Part of that is because NoSQL is a big umbrella, and covers extremely critical databases like Redis or even databases like Cloudflare's proprietary edge cache. But, even document stores are extremely critical to enterprise scaling; during Prime Day 2022, DynamoDB peaked at 150M rps. There's no SQL setup on the planet that could handle volume like that while still maintaining all the things that Make It SQL; you could start throwing read replicas and removing joins and cross-table lookups and sharding data and ope, you just re-invented a document store.

Here's the couple conclusions I have started operating by:

1. Document stores are, today, a strong choice at both low and high scales on the spectrum of systems scaling. Its great at low scales because you can avoid thinking about it too much. Its great at high scales because once you have the space to think about it you can attain substantially higher efficiency (performance+cost).

2. Making a document store operate more like SQL, for the things SQL is good at (joins, validation, etc) is a lot easier than making a SQL database operate like a document store for the things document stores are good at (Planetscale? there's a couple players in this game).

3. SQL-the-language sucks. There I said it; I'll die on that hill. The language was invented at a time +/- 2 years of Scheme, ML, Prolog, and Smalltalk. Our industry has rejected all of those. We haven't rejected SQL (yet). SQL is demonstrably, as a syntax, just as bad as those languages, evidenced by all the ORMs, injection attacks, etc. Databases tend to have a longer shelf life than programming languages, but SQL-the-language will die.

4. But, duh, SQL is fine. Go ahead and use it. In some situations it makes sense. In others it doesn't. Its a tool; one that has had 60 years to form around solving as many problems as possible.

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-prime-day-2022-aws-f...