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RE: "I love SQL": SQL as a language sucks in many ways, but so far there is no relational language that is ready to give it serious competition. The NoSQL movem
by tabtab 9y ago
RE: "I love SQL": SQL as a language sucks in many ways, but so far there is no relational language that is ready to give it serious competition. The NoSQL movement was not really about the language, but about niches where processing or location scaling was more important than standard or even good query languages.
The query language and hardware scaling are mostly two separate issues, and the NoSql movement unfortunately confused the two. It's mostly that SQL-based databases were slower to scale up, not that SQL is a horrible query language.
As far as query languages, I've been in long discusses and debates about alternatives to SQL. I was partial to a draft language called "SMEQL", but everyone has different opinions on what a query language should look like and emphasize: it's hard to make everyone happy.
- flukus 9y agoNot really a fan of SMEQL, but I do wonder why we don't have more specialist languages that can transpile to sql. It might be the case that that a better sql only offers minor improvements and work needs to be done elsewhere, like in the hydration back into non-2d data, the current solutions I've seen require multiple repetitive sql statements and we might be better off making the hydrators smarter.