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Relational is more than SQL

fauna.com

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Re: Relational is more than SQL

#71

Post by ttfkam »

robertlagrant wrote: post #18
ako wrote: post #4

Seems like a lot of what fauna does by storing documents isn’t really new, oracle, Postgres and others have provided this for a long time. I was really surprised by the performance of json queries [1], opens the doors to using Postgres as a client api cache, storing the payload in a table, and doing deserialization using (materialized) views. Difference seems to be the approach to minimize number of calls from your a…

Yes - the difference you mention seems to be the main difference.

CTEs and query pipelining are not sufficient?

Re: Relational is more than SQL

#72

Post by ttfkam »

remram wrote: post #70
ttfkam wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The syntax comparison section will likely sour a lot of viewers who already know SQL. You try too hard to highlight how easy and terse PRQL is by putting comma-separated items on their own lines but in SQL you put each item on separate lines. It may be typical of many SQL users and formatters, but it leaves a poor taste in the mouth that you aren't interested in an actual comparison but in marketing. For those who al…

It's just syntax, it compiles to SQL and runs on today's DBMS. It has no difference in speed or functionality.

(I couldn't help but notice you didn't comment on the difference in formatting in the examples.)

Do you have examples of PRQL working with jsonpath? Generating JSON? Unnesting arrays? Returning ids from an INSERT or UPDATE without making a separate read query?

Not trying to be argumentative. Honest question.

Re: Relational is more than SQL

#73

Post by raverbashing »

snthpy wrote: post #12

Disclaimer: I'm a core contributor to PRQL [1] and post about it a lot on HN. Apologies for jumping in on other people's threads, but for people interested in the headline, PRQL might be of interest. At PRQL[1] we believe that SQL is a combination of two things: 1. Relational Algebra, which is eternal because it's just maths, and 2. A language designed in the 70s that looks like COBOL. When people say that SQL will n…

> we believe that SQL is a combination of two things:

> 1. Relational Algebra, which is eternal because it's just maths, and 2. A language designed in the 70s that looks like COBOL.

Your belief is as real as my belief that it rains too much in London ;) (that is, it is correct)

But why people have such hold on to such a quirky syntax beats me

Re: Relational is more than SQL

#74

Post by smaddox »

danielvaughn wrote: post #46
leeuw01 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This +1. I've been burned before when using ORMs which translate simple-looking queries to terribly inneficient SQL statements underwater.

Yeah I’m a web dev, and recently I found out the most popular JS ORM doesn’t produce joins. It’ll just execute multiple queries in sequence. I don’t know how common that is in the ORM landscape but for me that’s a deal breaker.

Common enough to have a name: the N+1 query problem.

Re: Relational is more than SQL

#75

Post by probablypower »

herodoturtle wrote: post #3

This is a very interesting way to promote a product, credit to the author (who is an industry veteran it seems). I had no idea what Fauna was. I just clicked the link here because the title caught my eye (I work with databases quite a bit). The opening paragraph immediately grabbed my attention - "My first deep dive into SQL was in 1987, just before I became the first technical person at Microsoft to work on SQL Serv…

This is interesting, because I have the exact opposite response to these sorts of articles.

I think any bias or personal interest should be declared upfront in media (articles, videos, podcasts, ...) rather than appear as a 'common consumer' talking about a pain point in a relatable way. It really rubs me the wrong way when an article ends with a bait-and-switch, where you realise the entire article was manufactured to make you relate to their product's business case.

Obviously this method must resonate with people, like yourself, otherwise it wouldn't become so common. I guess I'm just the 'B' in the A/B testing that results in this type of marketing.

Re: Relational is more than SQL

#76

Post by gigatexal »

Re PRQL … I see it like my text editor. I’ll stick with vi because it has solved text editing. It’s done. Same with SQL. I’ve not seen anything yet ready to replace it. It’s not perfect. But for what I need from it it’s perfectly serviceable.

Re: Relational is more than SQL

#77

Post by intrasight »

jug wrote: post #38
snthpy wrote: post #12

Disclaimer: I'm a core contributor to PRQL [1] and post about it a lot on HN. Apologies for jumping in on other people's threads, but for people interested in the headline, PRQL might be of interest. At PRQL[1] we believe that SQL is a combination of two things: 1. Relational Algebra, which is eternal because it's just maths, and 2. A language designed in the 70s that looks like COBOL. When people say that SQL will n…

At least superficially this looks a lot like C# LINQ to me in terms of structure and database independence (as for EF Core + LINQ). It’s in my top 3 features of that language. https://www.tutorialsteacher.com/linq/sample-linq-queries Edit: Shortened to link due to formatting issues

Also reminds me of the Power Query M language - semantically anyway

Re: Relational is more than SQL

#78

Post by smaddox »

6345dhjdsf wrote: post #48
jimwhite42 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The "normal forms" could merely be suggestions for a database designer, not a technical limitation enforced by the software itself. I think most of the motivation for normal forms is to avoid 'update anomalies', which is essentially, don't represent the same information in two places in your base relation variables (aka tables in SQL). So you can have repeated values or nested relations in queries, and you can have…

(Posted under a different account because I'm being slow-posted again by HN) > In theory, the DBMS itself could directly support 'physical denormalization' and make this performance optimisation easier to implement and transparent to the application code. I think some SQL DBMSs have attempted to do things like this. Automatically managed, application-transparent, physical denormalisation entirely managed by the datab…

> Automatically managed, application-transparent, physical denormalisation entirely managed by the database is something I am very, very interested in.

Sounds a bit like Noria: https://github.com/mit-pdos/noria

Re: Relational is more than SQL

#80

Post by xwowsersx »

probablypower wrote: post #75
herodoturtle wrote: post #3

This is a very interesting way to promote a product, credit to the author (who is an industry veteran it seems). I had no idea what Fauna was. I just clicked the link here because the title caught my eye (I work with databases quite a bit). The opening paragraph immediately grabbed my attention - "My first deep dive into SQL was in 1987, just before I became the first technical person at Microsoft to work on SQL Serv…

This is interesting, because I have the exact opposite response to these sorts of articles. I think any bias or personal interest should be declared upfront in media (articles, videos, podcasts, ...) rather than appear as a 'common consumer' talking about a pain point in a relatable way. It really rubs me the wrong way when an article ends with a bait-and-switch, where you realise the entire article was manufactured…

I don't think there's any bait-n-switch unless you're unaware you're on fauna.com. Content marketing is well understood and at least in this case it isn't trash content someone spit out in 2 mins in order to lure you to their site. I don't see anything wrong with a company/product delivering value to you in the form of quality content and in exchange they are afforded an opportunity to run your eyes over their product offering.
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