Things to know about databases

Re:Things to know about databases by zvrba on Tuesday June 28, 2022 @01:23AM (#31904391)

I love the data model of RDBMS / SQL. I hate SQL _the language_. Verbose, irregular, attempting to mimic English and thus making it unintuitive and next to impossible to remember. 80% of my lookups into reference documentation is about syntax for things I don't use that often.

Examples: GRANT TO, REVOKE FROM, DENY TO (oh yes, what's the difference between REVOKE and DENY? and did you know that you can REVOKE a DENY?), arbitrary requirements for punctuation (e.g., = in BACKUP DATABASE AdventureWorks2012 TO DISK = 'X:\SQLServerBackups\AdventureWorks1.bak'), dubious context-sensitive "magical identifiers" (e.g., SELECT DATEPART(year, @t)), non-composability (how do you dynamically give a part specification to DATEPART?), etc, etc, etc.

It's possible to write a novel about just how unstructured and irregular "structured" query language is.

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Re:Things to know about databases by tpetry on Tuesday June 28, 2022 @02:34AM (#31904787)

All of your examples are vendor specific extensions to SQL. Nothing of that is part of the standard. So you are effectively hating a specific implementation which is not that logical.

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Re:Things to know about databases by extrememacaroni on Tuesday June 28, 2022 @04:12AM (#31905375)

Imagine hating the things that you use rather than a pdf with text, fascinating.

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Re:Things to know about databases by zvrba on Tuesday June 28, 2022 @07:57AM (#31906566)

Yes, ANSI syntax is surely composable or dynamic: EXTRACT(YEAR FROM DATE '1998-03-07')

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