As a standardized language, it doesn’t really exist; everyone implements numerous extensions, and almost no one is fully ansi compliant

Almost all formatters attempt to be generic (believing standardization exists), and fail to support the full grammar for any dialect.

Across the board, all parsers have pathetic error message support (error on line 3, which is actually just the start of the statement).

The schema offers type constraints, but querying/ide’s extract no value from that (that is, types are statically specified/constrained, but query editors all pretend its fully dynamic)

Theres a lot of awkward nonsense, like where clauses are parsed before the select in most parsing engines, causing alias usage to fail without wrapping in a subselect/with clause

The grammars themselves are an inconsistent, ad-hoc mess

The grammar is also unnecessarily context-dependent (eg from must follow select, and where after that), making programmatic composition unnecessarily difficult

I don’t know how much of the tooling issue is a result of SQL as a language versus the history itself, but I can at least confirm that trying to parse multiple dialects is absolute hell, which would at least explain the sorry state of affairs for eg formatters.

But the majority of its expressive power derives from the relational algebra, and has nothing to do with the SQL grammar, and thats the majority of its value. It seems obvious to me that at the very least the compositional issue of SQL, and its self-inconsistent grammar, should be vulnerable to near-lossless improvement without too much struggle, though I can’t say what the alternative would actually look like.

But it seems like its riddled with a lot of unnecessary flaws

I was experimenting around with creating an Entity Framework equivalent in Typescript and really wanted to create a SQL AST for use under the hood(optimizing queries, SQL push down, etc). Ended up using the PostgreSQL types and a Ruby plugin that binds some PostgreSQL libs to work on my POC. Crazy town.

As I learn more about SQL and pull off more complex queries, my respect for it deepens. To have such power and support so many use cases with so few constructs is really an engineering feat. It’s timeless for a reason.

Some of my relatively common access patterns are awkward to express, but they can still be expressed in a few lines + a CTE or two, which is really impressive for a language so small.

This is not to say we can’t do better. But SQL has achieved a deep resonance with its problem space that most tools don’t even come close to. The brightest minds and most effective tooling shops in our field would be lucky merely to do as well.

I'll give you just one : in SQL, you can write "WHERE 4 > (SELECT COUNT() FROM ... WHERE ... )" but you cannot write "WHERE (SELECT COUNT() FROM ... WHERE ... ) < 4" [Darwen, "The askew Wall"].

Or iow, for certain specific kinds of 'a' and 'b', you can write "a < b" but not "b > a". Do you actually know ANY language that exposes that kind of thing ??? REALLY ???

Given the vast usage of SQL and its overwhelming popularity, if there were real problems with the language then there would be a lot more noise about them. But most people seem to be happy with it.

If it's not broken, let's not fix it, eh?

>Given the vast usage of SQL and its overwhelming popularity, if there were real problems with the language then there would be a lot more noise about them. But most people seem to be happy with it.

In what universe does popularity imply quality? Certainly not the one I’m in — Avengers endgame is apparently #2 gross worldwide ever :-)

Which finally implies that usage popularity is not adequately explained by user preference, because you wouldn’t expect user language preference to have significant impact on the decision making process.

But regardless, are you also going to claim that C, Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, etc were optimal in their respective fields, during their respective eras, because they held total market domination? Incumbency is one hell if a drug..

Bandwaggoning and deffering to the status quo is not argument for quality; there are too many factors involved beyond quality itself. Fixable flaws in the language have been pointed out and not been addressed in this conversation chain. Alternatives languages exist, both academically and practically; they don’t come alone. Its not a competition in a void, the ecosystem has to move together. This occurs in every aspect of tech (did you ever wonder if there could be an OS other than unix and window styles?).

Asking why SQL was never beaten out in popularity is a hugely different question from whether there can be a better language than SQL, with largely unrelated amswers(Oracle/IBM were hardly fair players in anything they did)

The lack of popularity is also a reflection of how the string of next best things have failed to actually deliver on their promise, accompanied by the lack of a rational argument to adopt them instead of using a time-tested technology.

The SQL language is just an API to the total engine; the majority of its value derives from the relational model; the value of the relational algebra is not being questioned. Only the particular interface to describe the relational algebra.

The power of the JVM is not the power of the Java language. You can have other languages make use of the same power Java has access to by targetting the JVM, and as a programming community we accept that just fine (and we also accept that despite Java having many known flaws as a language, its status as a first-party Oracle interface to the JVM, and its position within the status quo, makes it extremely difficult to upend; but that hardly implies Java is some perfect language, as most HN users will trivially acknowledge).

In the same fashion, the SQL language is (ideally) decoupled from the RDBMS engine; it can be replaced. But in practice, they're not so decoupled, and SQL has been consistently the only first-class interface to the engine, so like Java, it (can) enjoys far greater ubiquity and stability from the quality of the underlying tech, than the language itself may deserve.

So once again; popularity/stability of the SQL language is not (necessarily) exemplary of the quality of the SQL language. It's much more likely that it represents the value of the RDBMS, and the relational model (which I don't think anyone is arguing against), and the SQL language enjoys a free ride by being the only interface thats even offered.

I mean hell, just read the article. It has trivially observable flaws in its design and semantics (like stuffing a 3VL logic into a 2VL language). EdgeQL may or may not be the optimal solution, and I'm not arguing (or interested in arguing) one way or the other on that, but I don't see how anyone can reasonably argue that SQL's ubiquity shows its perfection, when it's so clearly imperfect (because those flaws are being very directly pointed out).

Why is SQL the exception to the rule? You talk about popularity, but its really a question about stability. Remember, SQL is not that popular, as the NOSQL movement and comments like yours prove.

I don't think you've picked a very good example here of a field where the lingua franca has progressed over time. C still dominates nearly all systems programming, against all odds. It dominates operating system development, driver development, embedded systems development, pretty much anything that demands an extremely high degree of efficiency.

I agree with your overall point regarding SQL and its superior stability, but C is an example of where popularity won out against many better options over time. It's not like Rust was the first mainstream attempt to create safer languages for systems development either. There's been many over the years designed to fill the same niche, with more modern features, tools and goals. For better or worse, C still dominates the landscape for reasons entirely independent of whether or not it was truly the best tool for the every task.

Also, I'd contend that your claim regarding the popularity of NoSQL is incorrect. If you only talk to web developers writing Javascript, you'd get the impression that NoSQL is taking over the world. But the reality is that amongst pretty much every other demographic, SQL is still highly regarded as the ideal technology.

Well yes, because I argued that it was irrelevant to the original question: can SQL be improved?

Additionally I actually did address the question of SQL’s stability, at least partially: it’s not SQL thats so stable, but the relational model. SQL just happened to be IBM’s, and IBM was highly successful pushing its DB around, and Oracle (kind-of) cloned it to push their DB around with less contention, and so it went on. But its the RDBMS engine that primarily pushes a DB’s value; The SQL language is a ride-along.

And once more to be clear: its longevity is not a result of SQL’s quality, but the quality of the relational model. Thus its popularity, and stability (its also not that stable, in that its heavily extended by everyone in arbitrary fashion), is irrelevant to the original question.

>SQL is not that popular, as the NOSQL movement

If people are trying to make use of NoSQL because they want to avoid the SQL language (not the relational model), they’ve made a grave mistake in understanding their technologies; I don’t think such a naive opinion should be considered relevant to the equation.

If they’ve chosen NoSQL to avoid the relational model, then their choice says nothing about the SQL language.

Yes, they are trying to avoid the relational model by avoiding SQL because SQL has basically been the face of the relational model for 40 years. if there was something better, they'd use that. Nothing better has come up, and i don't know why either.

If you want to believe that popularity is a measure or reliable indicator of quality, I can't be bothered with you.

PS I have a worked-out example on my site of what it takes to enforce a business rule "no one has a salary higher than his manager's" in SQL (> 100 LOC) and in SIRA_PRISE (one single relatively simple formula of the RA to declare). You decide which is "better".

However, there is a more insidious problem with SQL: it's all too easy to write SQL statements that have O(N^2) complexity. A simple JOIN can easily result in O(N^2) complexity, yet there aren't easy tools to identify these performance issues. As a result, as a database grows, things that once were executed quickly take forever.

I'd like to see the end of joins, replaced with something that is more explicit about what is happening under the hood.

However. You are wrong tying the problem to joins. I remember an analyst who launched a SELECT COUNT because he was just curious about the number of rows in the table. No joins involved but users did suffer. Elsewhere in this thread I've seen the problem be tied to table scans, and that's also wrong. A table scan isn't a problem if it's a 5-page table. As Darwen often argued : why are people always only lamenting about those couple of tables with millions of rows ? Why should we deprive users of the power of relational algebra if their database simply aren't that big ?

It's a matter of determining the cost of the data access strategy (regardless of JOIN/EXCEPT/what_have_you) and (implementing a protocol for) capping it at runtime (or earlier if possible). No need for language changes here.

I was using joins as the common example. Sure, there are many other ways of using SQL to shoot yourself in the foot, but most of the issues I've run into seem to come from joins.

I don’t see the relationship between those two things; or rather, what the latter even means. Can you expand?

Also, apparently the “sets” described in the article are actually multisets aka bags [0] — so the same semantics as any other RDBMS/SQL. No idea why they’d confound the two, especially when set vs bag semantics is a well-discussed topic in the literature..

[0] https://edgedb.com/docs/edgeql/overview/#everything-is-a-set

SELECT StudentID, Name, (SELECT COUNT(x) FROM StudentExam WHERE StudentExam.StudentID = Student.StudentID) / (SELECT COUNT(x) FROM StudentEnrollmetnPeriods WHERE StudentEnrollmetnPeriods.StudentID = Student.StudentID) AS ExamsTakenPerYear FROM Student ORDER BY ExamsTaken DESC;

works because the result from aggregate are scalar and thus math operations always meaningful, albeit this in particular might not be the most brilliant example, there's definitely a case for running such operations on the server, because you might filter on the results, say, like

"select all student with less than 2 exam per year average"

at which point either you have the distinction between scalar and set in the language itself and you can filter invalid queries at the parsing level or you have to do the checks at runtime when two set are in an operation with mixed cardinality, halt the query and throw an error.

edit: count(x) because I don't know how to escape asteriks

it's not coincidence that the article complains about the same thing but in reverse:

> This is legal, but only if the subquery returns not more than one row. Otherwise, an error would be raised at run time.

except the 'fix' reintroduce it in a way that's subtler and way hard to detect because now everything is a set even when the intent is to have a scalar.

A lot of HiveQL's power comes from extending the language, not from the use of a small set of timeless features.

I mean, if I gave you protons, electrons and neutrons, you could build the universe out of them!

Expressiveness isn't inversely correlated to number of constructs.

In reality, it's not just about the small number of constructs, but also about how fundamental they are. In one sense, atoms are less fundamental than protons/neutrons/electrons, and therefore reduce the number of possible creations.

Are we just assuming that protons and neutrons automatically pull in the quarks, neutrinos, other leptons and force carriers as well? Does the electron have a photon dependency? What about dark matter?

If not, then the our three particles are internally inconsistent and woefully incapable of building a universe. Otherwise, our set of dependencies is essentially the whole darn universe anyway.

Same goes for atoms. Give me enough and I can build a star or particle accelerator to create whatever elements or fundamental particles I want.

Also, the GPs suggestion of building an accelerator is as silly as someone writing an assembly compiler via a mush of SQL. It probably can be done, but it's not in the spirit of the topic!

Anyway, I feel like your original comment and my reply are kind of doing the same thing at the meta-conversation level. We're stretching a metaphor in order to make some counterpoint argument. My intent with the excessive pedantry was to highlight the farce of conflating rough metaphor with substantive insight.

Anyway, internet conversations are hard. Thanks for engaging!

> In reality, it's not just about the small number of constructs, but also about how fundamental they are. In one sense, atoms are less fundamental than protons/neutrons/electrons, and therefore reduce the number of possible creations.

I think what OJFord is getting at is, what if you had more subatomic particles to build with?

Thus, whatever the complete set is for subatomic particles, it will most certainly have lesser members than for the complete set of atoms.

Getting back to my original point, SQL operates at a fundamental enough level that you do not need a great number of "constructs" to create a query that gives you whatever it is that you need.

I'm not saying it's perfect, but was just supplementing the OPs observation that SQL has surprisingly few "constructs".

Radiation makes the universe a lot more interesting.

All that said I think it was originally structured to partially be a human readable language and it fails pretty hard at that - that's a facet I'm sure smart people could revise to make more natural.

The problem isn't SQL. It's that Splunk's query engine is tied up internally with a "grammar" that is a direct port of a shell pipeline into C++ with no intermediate representation or anything a compiler guy would recognize as a grammar. There was no design, no mathematical underpinning to it.

Splunk's unstructured log capabilities are really domain knowledge about making them semistructured as fast as possible: token indexing, a lot of effort on recognizing character encodings and timestamps intelligently, looking for key=value pairs, and letting people write regexes to extract fields themselves. The query language isn't somehow designed for a different data model.

In EWD1123, Dijkstra showed that the relational calculus and the regularity calculus (which governs regexes) are basically the same thing. My takeaway from that is that the relational model can be reinterpreted as a model over anything you want to match and manipulate with regexes by just changing the field selectors.

More legitimately splunk may simply be unable to deliver performant data expression if a user is typing a query complex enough to justify SQL.

FWIW postgres used to have its own query language derived from QUEL[0] rather than SQL.

And findings that SQL is kinda shit are not exactly recent, e.g. C.J. Date's "A Critique of the SQL Language" (1983) lists the following sections

* lack of orthogonality: expressions

* lack of orthogonality: builtin functions

* lack of orthogonality: miscellaneous items formal definition

* mismatch with host languages

* missing function

* mistakes

* aspects of the relational model not supported

The conclusion was, obviously, prescient:

> if SQL is adopted on a wide scale in its present fortm~ then we will to some degree have missed the relational boat~ or at least failed to capitalize to the fullest possible extent on the potential of the relational model. That would be a pity, because we had an opportunity to do it right, and with a little effort we could have done so. The question is whether it is now too late. I sincerely hope not.

SQL succeeded not because it's "pretty darn effective" but because IBM decided on it (at a time where it drove technology) and Oracle are great at sales and marketing (whereas Ingres definitely wasn't).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUEL_query_languages

Most of Postgres is standard SQL. It's just that most non-Postgres databases do not implement standard SQL very well.

It's got a lot of stuff going on in there.

This sounds amazing. Does anyone have a link to some docs for this?

That's correct, and that's why PostgreSQL has ADD CONSTRAINT.

The constraints describe the actual schema of the data; INDEX is an DBMS-specific implementation* for improving performance (including index types, etc.).

* Those since the standard does not yet cover some thing partial unique constraints, these have to be done as INDEX in PostgreSQL.

That's not a bug, that's a feature. Deriving from the deliberate intent to make physical independence (which was simply nonexistent at the time the model was conceived) a reality.

Call it a "hint", if you will, the meaning of which is implementation defined. But standardize the syntax for pete's sake.

And "hints" in the language are not exactly going to improve "interoperability" if their meaning is still allowed to be implementation-defined, are they ?

Sure, but the non-standard enhancements like JSON support are part of what sets Postgres apart from the competition IMO.

The release is planned for roughly next September/October.

[0] https://modern-sql.com/

[1] https://modern-sql.com/slides/ModernSQL-2019-05-08.pdf, for example

(Edited for formatting.)

In PG, a JSON column is so well integrated that you can do all sorts of crazy stuff (indices over JSON queries is my favorite). You could build an entire RDBMS on top of PG's JSON column.

Postgrest works very well as this shim layer, though I've moved on to writing sql directly in the client and communicating through a web socket shim. In terms of reducing code complexity and improving performance this is absolutely unbeatable, you just need to parse incoming sql to sanitize it and make sure there is no role escalation. Because of postgres's foreign data wrappers this method can provide a consistent surface for basically all your enterprise data. The only gotcha with FDWs is that some of them don't "push down" many query clauses, so you end up doing much slower queries on the remote system and filtering locally, which is terrible for obvious reasons. That being said, the FDWs are pretty much all open source, so you can just implement push down support for those missing clauses yourself.

"Just"? I guess I'm skeptical of a statement that begins "you just have to parse sql".

Is this actually easier than I'm imagining it? I'd be curious to hear more about the security and authorization model of this approach.

A good tool for this purpose is https://github.com/JavaScriptor/js-sql-parser as it will fail to parse complex statements that are likely to include an attack vector.

In terms of authorization, you can either create per user connection pools if using web sockets and log the user in directly that way (which makes things easy) or if you must use rest, use a single connection pool with a master user then use some form of token to tell the shim who to set role to before executing the query.

https://github.com/PostgREST/postgrest

https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Python

https://github.com/plv8/plv8

https://www.graphile.org/

But, the common workhorse tool that has stayed strong through all these has been the common SQL. Elegant, simple, powerful and thoroughly reliable, it is my primary go-to tool. In an otherwise changing ecosystem, its simplicity and reliability is a boon. Yes, it is primarily because of the nostalgic familiarity but I also believe it continues to be extremely powerful, one that will serve you very well.