4 ms·
Pipelined Relational Query Language, Pronounced "Prequel"
- latexr 8mo agoThe title of the submission is literally the first line on the website. I always find that funny. If you have to provide a pronunciation guide for your product, perhaps consider a different name. I guarantee you’ll still have people pronouncing each individual letter, either because they don’t know or because it’ll be less ambiguous.
- dmit 8mo agoI mean, as someone who grew up pronouncing it "Ess-Cue-Ell", I wish I learned earlier on that "Sequel" was the intended pronunciation. :)
- latexr 8mo agoWhich is my point. A better name wouldn’t have had that problem. How could you ever know how it’s pronounced if you bump into it on a blog or social media post instead of the official website? We don’t write “SQL (pronounced “sequel”)” every time, we just write “SQL”. But even then, it makes sense to choose to pronounce it “the wrong way”. I say “sequelite” because that’s fairly clear in context, but “sequel” might not be so I pronounce each letter in that case. Did know PNG is supposed to be pronounced “ping”? I don’t know anyone who chooses to do that, even if they know.
- randallsquared 7mo agoI pronounce PNG "ping". Also JPEG as "jay peg" but, counter to the creator's intention, GIF with a hard "g".
- WorldMaker 7mo agoMy favorite answer to the GIF pronunciation debate is to prefer the Old English pronunciation from back before the noun "gift" picked up that extra consonant at the end, which Old English pronounced it rather like "hyeef". (Similar to what a "g" will do in some latinx dialects.) That pronunciation splits the difference and makes some of both hard and soft "g" proponents angry, which is to say that pronunciation is also a gift from the past.
- WorldMaker 7mo agoSQL's terrible name is IBM's fault for multiple reasons. They were going to spell it Sequel but IBM's lawyers found another company had a trademark on Sequel and forced them to rename it to avoid lawsuits. Rather than pick a new, more original name they instead shrunk the acronym and then IBM's legal also made them tell people to spell it out instead of call it "sequel" to continue to avoid the other company's trademark. So IBM made sure the name and its pronunciation was always a mixed message from very early in the language's history. Thanks, IBM (I've always pronounced PNG "ping". It's interesting that there is a split there, I'm not sure I would have expected a large one.)
- ajuc 7mo agoNobody calls it sequel in my country. Even people who know because then they have to explain it which wastes time for no benefit.
- tremon 7mo agoI always used ess-cue-ell to refer to the language, and sequel to refer to the Microsoft product. It would never occur to me to pronounce the Open Source alternative as postgressequel either, that's also invariably called post-gress-cue-ell here.
- yhavr 7mo agoYes, in Ukrainian/Russian PRQL can be easily read as "prikol" (joke/gag/quirk). But I guess the best name would be "perkele" (emotional, like "damn") in Finnish.
- Avshalom 7mo agoI continue to pronounce it S-Q-L... and G-U-I; generally I pronounce most things as initialism and I'm right to do so.
- chuckadams 7mo agoFor the first half of the 90's I pronounced Linux as "LINE-nucks". Then while he still had a thick accent, Linus told us all how he pronounced it "LEE-nooks".
- rgovostes 7mo ago> I wrote SQLite, and I think it should be pronounced "S-Q-L-ite". Like a mineral. But I'm cool with y'all pronouncing it any way you want. :-) — D. Richard Hipp
- Taikonerd 7mo agoIs this project stalling out? The last post on the "posts" page is from March 2023. But the last commit to the git repo was last week...
- jeltz 7mo agoMatching SQL in features is very hard, especially if you also want to make it more sane and more powerful at the same time while also wanting to be able the generate valid SQL from your syntax. So I am not surprised that it stalled out.
- Taikonerd 7mo agoSure, but they never intended to support everything you can do in SQL. For example, they say on the Roadmap page that they're only going to support SELECTs -- there won't be a PRQL way to do an INSERT, UPDATE, etc.
- andrew_lettuce 7mo agoWhen it comes to SQL it's the select that's by far the majority of the work though, the hard work with mutating operations is on the database implementation, not really the syntax or query plan
- jeltz 7mo agoI was only thinking about SELECT queries when I wrote ny comment because those are the hard things to implement.
- maximilianroos 7mo agoMaintainer here! Indeed we're doing fewer new features (and haven't posted to the posts page in a long time, as you noticed). But it's still maintained, folks are still using it, if anyone finds bugs in simple-to-moderate queries then we'll fix them. LLMs probably took a bit of the wind out of our sails for making this "the new standard". But I still think it's a really nice language and interface; if the world changed again such that it became more widely useful, I'd jump to spending lots of time on it again.
- Taikonerd 7mo agoGoogle's "pipe syntax" is a similar idea: [0] It's not as elegant as PRQL, because of course it's bolted onto the existing SQL syntax, rather than a redesign from scratch. But it has a big name behind it, and it's actually running in prod in Google Cloud... so it might have more momentum. [0]: https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/data-analytics/simplify-your-sql-with-pipe-syntax-in-bigquery-and-cloud-logging https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/data-analytics/simpli...
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- hbarka 7mo agoProcedural language fanatics have been trying for years to overturn the best declarative language for relational data.
- esafak 7mo agoPRQL is declarative. They are just heeding the maxim "If it's broke, fix it".
- otabdeveloper4 7mo agoTyping fields before table name is like the least bad thing about SQL and doesn't need fixing.
- data_ders 7mo agowhat do you think is the "most bad" thing about SQL?
- otabdeveloper4 7mo agoLack of abstractions like (block-scoped) variables and lambda functions. SQL is declarative and purely functional anyways, so implementing these is a no-brainer.
- ux266478 7mo agoThat would be the domain of logic programming languages like Prolog. SQL and its dialects are more for very specific and restricted applications of relational calculus, not general languages for expression of relations, conditions and categories.
- zerkten 7mo agoKusto is similar: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/kusto/query/ https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/kusto/query/
- bob1029 7mo ago"Pipelined" SQL already exists in the form of common table expressions. I don't know of any providers where this is not available. SQLite has had support since 2014.
- data_ders 7mo agoI agree that CTEs help solve the problem of being able to read a SQL query from top to bottom, but I wouldn't say they're a panacea! Personally, it's weird to me that `FROM` (scan) comes after `SELECT` (projection). IMHO the datasource should come first! CTEs don't solve this problem they just let you chain multiple SELECTs together. A real use case is that it would allow intellisense to kick in a lot earlier! Instead you have to write `SELECT * FROM my_table` and only after can you edit the `*` and get auto-complete suggestions of the columns from `my_table`
- bob1029 7mo ago> CTEs don't solve this problem They kind of do in my head. "WITH" reads to me exactly like the datasource you are looking for.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- dewey 7mo agoEvery time I see these layers on top of SQL I think: Just use regular, boring SQL It will be around for a long time, there's an infinite number of resources and examples for it and if you ever have to onboard someone into your code they don't need to learn something new. You can get pretty far by just using CTEs to "pipeline".
- data_ders 7mo agoI'm as big a SQL stan as the next person and I'm also very skeptical anytime anyone says that SQL needs to be replaced. At the same time, it's challenging that SQL cannot be iteratively improved and experimented upon. IMHO, PRQL is a reasonable approach to extending SQL without replacing SQL. But what I'd love to see is projects like Google's zeta-sql [1] and Substrait [2] get more traction. It would provide a more stable, standardized foundation upon which SQL could be improved, which would make the case for "SQL forever" even more strong. I've blogged about this before [3]. [1]: https://github.com/google/googlesql https://github.com/google/googlesql [2]: https://substrait.io/ https://substrait.io/ [3]: https://roundup.getdbt.com/p/problem-exists-between-database-and https://roundup.getdbt.com/p/problem-exists-between-database...
- kubb 7mo agoComplex queries in SQL can quickly get out of control. The fact that you need to replicate the same complex expressions in multiple values that you select or multiple parts of a where clause is bad enough. That there’s no way to pipe the result of a query into another query is just adding insult to injury. (Just create a custom view bro). But if technology competed in quality and not in vendor lock in, we wouldn’t have to deal with C++ or JavaScript.
- tomjakubowski 7mo agoDuckDB's "friendly SQL" variant fixes some of these little problems with SQL, including giving the ability to use a column alias in WHERE clauses. https://duckdb.org/docs/stable/sql/dialect/friendly_sql https://duckdb.org/docs/stable/sql/dialect/friendly_sql
- 7mo ago
- thesz 7mo agoSQL is not a pipeline, it is a graph. Imagine three joins of three queries A,B and C, where first join J1 joins A and B, second join J2 joins A and C and third join J3 joins J1 and J2. Note that I said "queries," not "tables" - these A, B and C can be complex things one would not want or be able to compute more than once. Forget about compute, A, B and C can be quite complex to even write down and the user may really do not want to repeat itself. Look at TPC-DS, there are subqueries in the "with" sections that are quite complex. This is why pipeline replacements for SQL are more or less futile efforts. They simplify simple part and avoid touching complex one. I think that something like Verse [1] is more or less way to go. Not the Verse itself, but functional logic programming as an idea, where you can have first class data producers and effect system to specify transactions. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unreal_Engine#Verse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unreal_Engine#Verse
- data_ders 7mo agoTIL about Verse looks cool I'll have to check it out. > SQL is not a pipeline, it is a graph. Maybe it's both? and maybe there will always be hard-to-express queries in SQL, and that's ok? the RDBMS's relational model is certainly a graph and joins accordingly introduce complexity. For me, just as creators of the internet regret that subdomains come before domains, I really we could go back in time and have `FROM` be the first predicate and not `SELECT`. This is much more intuitive and lends itself to the idea of a pipeline: a table scan (FROM) that is piped to a projection (SELECT).
- thesz 7mo agoPipeline is a specific kind of a graph. Yes, there will always be hard-to-express queries, the question is how far can we go?
- lloydatkinson 7mo agoDoes it really help to call SQL a graph?
- thesz 7mo ago
- hardwaregeek 7mo agoThere’s probably a good reason why not, but I’d love a query language with sum types. They just feel like a natural way to model a lot of data
- jdkfjdo 7mo agoSometimes I wonder if the only thing needed in SQL is to switch the order of FROM and SELECT. I think that would satisfy many people who are bothered by the syntax.
- cyanydeez 7mo agoIts not the only thing needed. To do anything, first you need major databases to implement.
- andrew_lettuce 7mo agoYou might already know this but in relational algebra the select is SQL's from and the projection is SQL's select, which makes more sense. I always preferred the linq syntax with the from first too
- jelder 7mo agoDuckDB had the right idea: just allow some flexibility in the relative order of the `select` and `from` clauses, and make a few other concessions for ergonomics. This then becomes valid: from events -- table is first, which enables autocomplete select count(), -- * is implied, easier to type customer_id, -- trailing commas allowed everywhere group by all -- automatically groups by all non-aggregate columns order by all -- orders rows by all columns in selected order https://duckdb.org/docs/stable/sql/dialect/friendly_sql https://duckdb.org/docs/stable/sql/dialect/friendly_sql
- andrew_lettuce 7mo agoI get the ease of use - and sometimes use them myself- but implied (or relative) shortcuts are IMO a bad habit that can lead to serious issues that don't manifest as errors. I do like the from clause first which better matches the underlying relationship algebra!
- infogulch 7mo agoThis looks pretty nice to use! How does it work if you want to join multiple complex subqueries? How far can a new query language like this go? Could this be added as a native query language in e.g. postgresql?