3 ms·

if you want to suggest a better alternative How about an RDBMS that exposes a relational algebra api and then people can experiment with developing alternative

if you want to suggest a better alternative How about an RDBMS that exposes a relational algebra api and then people can experiment with developing alternative languages/interfaces instead of having a single designed by committee string-eval based atrocity.

sokoloff 18y ago
What percent of the top N (your pick of N and your choice of big-ness metric) websites do you suppose are using predominantly string-eval'd SQL? I don't think it's very many; I'd wager that most big shops are quite happily using SQL, using stored procedures, views, and parameterized queries far more often than using "jam SQL into an nvarchar and execute the resulting string". SQL may have its warts, but in the world of "I gotta get things done and not sweat data persistence", I think it's pretty wildly, successfully, and fairly universally used, almost like the cockroach of the data center. When I look out and think about what's going to kill our ability to take orders, scale to new levels of growth, or to have development be efficient at developing new features, SQL the language doesn't make my top 20, and probably doesn't even rise to the level of "all other receiving votes". MS-SQL the database engine probably does make my top 10, but that's only because we're continually chopping away at the items on that list. It does take us a while to train brand-new devs on how to write effective SQL, but it takes us time to train them on how to write C#, how to write good test cases, how to structure code for testability and write unit tests, etc. IOW, it's just one of a laundry list of needs, and a proposed alternative interface would also be something on that list to teach them.
pradocchia 18y ago
> How about an RDBMS that exposes a relational algebra api MonetDB does this, though rather low-level: http://monetdb.cwi.nl/projects/monetdb/MonetDB/Documentation/MAL-Reference.html http://monetdb.cwi.nl/projects/monetdb/MonetDB/Documentation...

sokoloff 18y ago

What percent of the top N (your pick of N and your choice of big-ness metric) websites do you suppose are using predominantly string-eval'd SQL? I don't think it's very many; I'd wager that most big shops are quite happily using SQL, using stored procedures, views, and parameterized queries far more often than using "jam SQL into an nvarchar and execute the resulting string". SQL may have its warts, but in the world of "I gotta get things done and not sweat data persistence", I think it's pretty wildly, successfully, and fairly universally used, almost like the cockroach of the data center. When I look out and think about what's going to kill our ability to take orders, scale to new levels of growth, or to have development be efficient at developing new features, SQL the language doesn't make my top 20, and probably doesn't even rise to the level of "all other receiving votes". MS-SQL the database engine probably does make my top 10, but that's only because we're continually chopping away at the items on that list. It does take us a while to train brand-new devs on how to write effective SQL, but it takes us time to train them on how to write C#, how to write good test cases, how to structure code for testability and write unit tests, etc. IOW, it's just one of a laundry list of needs, and a proposed alternative interface would also be something on that list to teach them.

pradocchia 18y ago

> How about an RDBMS that exposes a relational algebra api MonetDB does this, though rather low-level: http://monetdb.cwi.nl/projects/monetdb/MonetDB/Documentation/MAL-Reference.html http://monetdb.cwi.nl/projects/monetdb/MonetDB/Documentation...