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My first thought was "Popular compared to what? What was the alternative?" I was expecting to see hierarchical databases, OODBs and alternate query languages m

My first thought was "Popular compared to what? What was the alternative?" I was expecting to see hierarchical databases, OODBs and alternate query languages mentioned. The claim for "Distaste" for SQL is odd and vague. I agree with the first point - "Relational databases are ACID and that's powerful" but I ask "so what, where's the distaste?" People who know a bit about RDBMSs know that they do a lot of heavy lifting for you. Is the point that a younger generation don't know that? What are they teaching kids in college these days? Massively parallel data storage systems are in vogue now, bacause of the very the few very popular web apps that need to scale a lot horizontally, and SQL databases don't really deal with that. But that's not "How SQL got popular". Maybe it's why some have forgotten.

silentbicycle 17y ago
Whenever I read articles like this, I get the impression that an apparently sizable (or just vocal?) subset of the people who "know SQL" learned it from some sort of "Teach Yourself PHP & MySQL in 24 Hours" book, and completely missed learning about how the relational model actually works, how to normalize a table, etc. They have a terrible experience using MySQL on a database with one huge, un-indexed table, and they're convinced for life that all RDBMSs are crap. I mean, if you don't like relational databases for a real reason, that's one thing, but this is like complaining because gcc won't run a Visual Basic program you copy-and-pasted, and having half the people you whine to not know any better, so they tell their friends too. I can understand when people complain that SQL is a lousy implementation of the relational model (or about its syntax being a bit verbose, etc.), but that's clearly not the case here.
prpon 17y ago
I agree with you here. Is there any one here on HN who is not comfortable with SQL? However, the increasing usage of frameworks such as rails/grails/hibernate/JPA makes it easier to access data without having to worry about SQL until something breaks. The prime time for SQL has long been over, it is a necessary tool most of us don't think too much about.
- timwiseman 17y ago
  The prime time for SQL has long been over, it is a necessary tool most of us don't think too much about. -- I have to respectfully disagree. Its often when a tool becomes so ubiquitious and sufficiently intuitive that its true power comes to the fore. It is like the electric grid, when it was first being forged everyone who used it thought about it extensively, now hardly anyone does. But that does not mean the grid's prime time is over, it means that now it is truly becoming powerful.
- silentbicycle 17y ago
  Relational databases are designed for dealing with huge collections of data. Huge like terabytes. (This is, of course, their very reason for existence.) Every time a framework pulls a big set of data across the wire to do a local calculation on it (a for loop summing a list of values, for example), it's doing a completely unnecessary round trip to do (probably in PHP or Ruby, no less) a task for which the database has already been specifically optimized. It could have done all the calculation during the same pass it took to select the records and just sent the answer instead. Frameworks obscure this. Just a thought.
  - kragen 17y ago
    Relational databases were invented in 1970. The basic design for most of the popular RDBMSs today (Oracle, DB2, Ingres → Postgres, Sybase) was created in the 1980s. In 1982 you could buy a 5MB Winchester disk for US$2000. A terabyte of disk therefore would have cost US$400 million. This is not what relational databases were designed for. Otherwise your comment is correct.
    - silentbicycle 17y ago
      Hence, "are designed", not "were designed". Interesting data point, by the way. I have a little USB flash drive that stores 4 GB. It was about $10. That's probably more disk storage than existed in the entire world until Y years ago -- any idea what year?
amalcon 17y ago
The guy did notice why SQL "got popular", but he only noticed the tip of the iceberg. SQL "got popular" because it gives you tools to make your data store solve annoying problems for you, sort of like how programming languages give you the tools to make your compiler solve annoying problems for you. SQL "got popular" because, while there are of course differences between implementations, it was the closest thing to date to a common protocol to interface with the database. SQL "got popular" because it gives people the tools they need to directly poke around in the data without needing to write an application, a task that's often underestimated. The "distaste" for SQL comes (as far as I can tell) from attempts to work around it. If you just want to write a Python program, SQL becomes just a bunch of boilerplate that you want to avoid. If you want software that does X, and you know how to use your database, it will help you enormously.
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]

silentbicycle 17y ago

Whenever I read articles like this, I get the impression that an apparently sizable (or just vocal?) subset of the people who "know SQL" learned it from some sort of "Teach Yourself PHP & MySQL in 24 Hours" book, and completely missed learning about how the relational model actually works, how to normalize a table, etc. They have a terrible experience using MySQL on a database with one huge, un-indexed table, and they're convinced for life that all RDBMSs are crap. I mean, if you don't like relational databases for a real reason, that's one thing, but this is like complaining because gcc won't run a Visual Basic program you copy-and-pasted, and having half the people you whine to not know any better, so they tell their friends too. I can understand when people complain that SQL is a lousy implementation of the relational model (or about its syntax being a bit verbose, etc.), but that's clearly not the case here.

prpon 17y ago

I agree with you here. Is there any one here on HN who is not comfortable with SQL? However, the increasing usage of frameworks such as rails/grails/hibernate/JPA makes it easier to access data without having to worry about SQL until something breaks. The prime time for SQL has long been over, it is a necessary tool most of us don't think too much about.

timwiseman 17y ago
The prime time for SQL has long been over, it is a necessary tool most of us don't think too much about. -- I have to respectfully disagree. Its often when a tool becomes so ubiquitious and sufficiently intuitive that its true power comes to the fore. It is like the electric grid, when it was first being forged everyone who used it thought about it extensively, now hardly anyone does. But that does not mean the grid's prime time is over, it means that now it is truly becoming powerful.
silentbicycle 17y ago
Relational databases are designed for dealing with huge collections of data. Huge like terabytes. (This is, of course, their very reason for existence.) Every time a framework pulls a big set of data across the wire to do a local calculation on it (a for loop summing a list of values, for example), it's doing a completely unnecessary round trip to do (probably in PHP or Ruby, no less) a task for which the database has already been specifically optimized. It could have done all the calculation during the same pass it took to select the records and just sent the answer instead. Frameworks obscure this. Just a thought.
- kragen 17y ago
  Relational databases were invented in 1970. The basic design for most of the popular RDBMSs today (Oracle, DB2, Ingres → Postgres, Sybase) was created in the 1980s. In 1982 you could buy a 5MB Winchester disk for US$2000. A terabyte of disk therefore would have cost US$400 million. This is not what relational databases were designed for. Otherwise your comment is correct.
  - silentbicycle 17y ago
    Hence, "are designed", not "were designed". Interesting data point, by the way. I have a little USB flash drive that stores 4 GB. It was about $10. That's probably more disk storage than existed in the entire world until Y years ago -- any idea what year?

amalcon 17y ago

The guy did notice why SQL "got popular", but he only noticed the tip of the iceberg. SQL "got popular" because it gives you tools to make your data store solve annoying problems for you, sort of like how programming languages give you the tools to make your compiler solve annoying problems for you. SQL "got popular" because, while there are of course differences between implementations, it was the closest thing to date to a common protocol to interface with the database. SQL "got popular" because it gives people the tools they need to directly poke around in the data without needing to write an application, a task that's often underestimated. The "distaste" for SQL comes (as far as I can tell) from attempts to work around it. If you just want to write a Python program, SQL becomes just a bunch of boilerplate that you want to avoid. If you want software that does X, and you know how to use your database, it will help you enormously.

deleted 17y ago
[deleted]