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SQL has its warts for sure, I personally long for the day we get a better declarative query lang than the stringly-typed thing we have now. > An opcode with so

SQL has its warts for sure, I personally long for the day we get a better declarative query lang than the stringly-typed thing we have now. > An opcode with some arguments would be preferable to writing a poem and hoping it gets interpreted how I meant Not sure I follow here though? Is it the declarative nature you don’t like? SQL can be a bit ugly sometimes, but I’ve never really had “no that’s not what I mean” moments?

kbolino 2y ago
This may be a gripe specific to Postgres but I find that the documentation can be obtuse. Yes, I'm sure it parses consistently, but what a given word or phrase does in a given context isn't always clear. I've had to write a lot more database tests to be sure I know what I'm doing than when I was calling specific operations with well defined arguments in NoSQL land. Maybe this issue is mostly in my head, but the semantics of various operations seem a lot fuzzier than I'm used to.
- maxbond 2y ago
  SQLite does make this a lot clearer using flow charts, I wish Postgres' docs had that. https://www.sqlite.org/lang_createtable.html https://www.sqlite.org/lang_createtable.html You will find all the same information in the Postgres docs, but in a more obtuse, grammatical form. https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/sql-createtable.html https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/sql-createtable.html They will tell you what each component does further down the page though. Mongo's documentation has a slicker and more ergonomic design though, no question. Mongo uses a "cheat sheet"/"tabular" approach, and Postgres uses a "printed reference book" approach, which is rather dated. Mongo is very good at surfacing the complexity and nitty gritty details immediately. It's all there in the Postgres docs, but you have to sit with them for longer and have more of an intuition about how they've organized it. I've also found the Postgres.FM podcast to be a great resource. I've been working with Mongo recently and something that's bothered me is that I haven't found a comparable resource, where practitioners give you the straight dope about what stupid mistake you're going to make to bring down production and how to fix it. Substantially all of the learning material for Mongo is from Mongo the company, and is just not as candid.

kbolino 2y ago

This may be a gripe specific to Postgres but I find that the documentation can be obtuse. Yes, I'm sure it parses consistently, but what a given word or phrase does in a given context isn't always clear. I've had to write a lot more database tests to be sure I know what I'm doing than when I was calling specific operations with well defined arguments in NoSQL land. Maybe this issue is mostly in my head, but the semantics of various operations seem a lot fuzzier than I'm used to.

maxbond 2y ago
SQLite does make this a lot clearer using flow charts, I wish Postgres' docs had that. https://www.sqlite.org/lang_createtable.html https://www.sqlite.org/lang_createtable.html You will find all the same information in the Postgres docs, but in a more obtuse, grammatical form. https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/sql-createtable.html https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/sql-createtable.html They will tell you what each component does further down the page though. Mongo's documentation has a slicker and more ergonomic design though, no question. Mongo uses a "cheat sheet"/"tabular" approach, and Postgres uses a "printed reference book" approach, which is rather dated. Mongo is very good at surfacing the complexity and nitty gritty details immediately. It's all there in the Postgres docs, but you have to sit with them for longer and have more of an intuition about how they've organized it. I've also found the Postgres.FM podcast to be a great resource. I've been working with Mongo recently and something that's bothered me is that I haven't found a comparable resource, where practitioners give you the straight dope about what stupid mistake you're going to make to bring down production and how to fix it. Substantially all of the learning material for Mongo is from Mongo the company, and is just not as candid.