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SQL-the-standard is one of the great mistakes of computing, a bad abstraction of Titanic proportions. The standard should have been abandoned long ago in favor
by pphysch 2y ago
SQL-the-standard is one of the great mistakes of computing, a bad abstraction of Titanic proportions. The standard should have been abandoned long ago in favor of the actually-existing reference implementations like PostgreSQL.
"Standard SQL is good and portable and worth spending enormous resources supporting" -- statements dreamed up by the utterly deranged
- dventimi 2y agoI regard this as hyperbolic.
- 392 2y agoNo one has ever said that since no database implements the whole standard or limits themselves to just the standard. jOOQ blog has some good writings on this. I am glad at least that the standard gave us a sizeable common subset over half a century rather than everybody doing their own thing from day one.
- pphysch 2y ago> I am glad at least that the standard gave us a sizeable common subset over half a century rather than everybody doing their own thing from day one. There are tons of popular programming languages and they share paradigms, good ideas and syntactic similarities. Query languages ought to be the same. Dialects work in natural language because interpretability, syntax and semantics are all fuzzy. Dialects in computer languages is an anti-pattern because syntax and grammar must be precise and deterministic. You are either writing Java or gibberish, the Java toolchain will never charitably interpret your syntax errors as "close enough to understand". SQL-the-standard birthed a bunch of different dialects of SQL that ought to be de-jure separate query languages. So much human effort is wasted dealing with the standard SQL abstraction layer. If someone is migrating from Oracle to Postgres, the fact that their query languages are eerily similar is far down the list of practical concerns.