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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/

by 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?

by prpon 17y ago

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?