Re:A Short Story About SQL’s Biggest Rival
by roenxi on Friday October 09, 2020 @06:59PM
(#24735278)
They should implement something using straight functions, extremely spartan with no special syntax at all, and let everyone build their own favoured DSL over the top.
One of my major complaints about SQL is the syntax is so finicky that it is really hard to replace it with a [something -> sql] layer, because the something layer can't generate all the silly syntactic forms that SQL uses.
Eg, personal favourite, it is easy to have a dsl that translates
select(y = fn(x)) -> select fn(x) as y
that then breaks down because it can't construct
??? -> select extract(month from x) as y
and that is the only syntax the SQL database decided to understand. There are too many cases like that that need special handling, especially once SQL dialect-specific stuff comes into play.
One of my major complaints about SQL is the syntax is so finicky that it is really hard to replace it with a [something -> sql] layer, because the something layer can't generate all the silly syntactic forms that SQL uses.
Eg, personal favourite, it is easy to have a dsl that translates
that then breaks down because it can't construct and that is the only syntax the SQL database decided to understand. There are too many cases like that that need special handling, especially once SQL dialect-specific stuff comes into play.