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This article has its amount of religious bias and wishful thinking. The author tries to establish his base on a fact that SQL is all about relational algebra an
by kunley 16y ago
This article has its amount of religious bias and wishful thinking. The author tries to establish his base on a fact that SQL is all about relational algebra and it's the right paradigm to query your data. While I agree with the latter, the author (and lots of other people) seems to forget that SQL is a dumbed-down-aimed-to-mediocre-programmers contraption inspired by relational algebra, but not really properly relational! It's really far from what Codd had in mind. If you read the history of early SQL dialects and DB2 vs Oracle competition it's clear that SQL was marketed as a language everyone can program in (thus the stupid imitation of a natural language) -- we know in XXI century that this is a bs...
I'd say that SQL is a COBOL of relational algebra...
- Devilboy 16y agoAre there any (more suitable) alternatives to SQL?
- silentbicycle 16y agoThe K/Q people (http://kx.com/ http://kx.com/) have one interesting interpretation. It's quite expensive for production use* and uses an APL dialect as a query language, which tends to scare away a lot of developers. I'm utterly fascinated with it, albeit from a distance. (J is cool, too, but doesn't come bundled with a high-end in-memory database.) * I've heard it can run $60k/CPU. It's designed for realtime stock data mining (https://cs1.cs.nyu.edu/cs/faculty/shasha/papers/hpts.pdf https://cs1.cs.nyu.edu/cs/faculty/shasha/papers/hpts.pdf), so they get away with it.
- mistermann 16y agoCan you give us some syntax examples?
- Devilboy 16y agoIf it's anything like APL you probably don't want to see it...
- silentbicycle 16y agohttp://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1511121 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1511121 I meant to reply to this, didn't notice until after the edit window closed...
- silentbicycle 16y agohttp://nsl.com/k/s/s.k http://nsl.com/k/s/s.k (from http://nsl.com/papers/spreadsheet.htm http://nsl.com/papers/spreadsheet.htm) http://nsl.com/papers/kisntlisp.htm http://nsl.com/papers/kisntlisp.htm This C code helped me get into the headspace. (http://nsl.com/papers/origins.htm http://nsl.com/papers/origins.htm) See also: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=266982 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=266982
- timclark 16y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D_(data_language_specification) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D_(data_language_specification) Chris Date is worth reading for his ideas on what a good language for relational algebra should be like and why SQL isn't that language.