For Want of a JOIN

Re:For Want of a JOIN by Kwpolska on Thursday December 22, 2022 @02:39PM (#34097551)

SQL being a plaintext, human-friendly language is a good thing. SQL is a common skill transferrable between languages and environments, and it is also easily usable by non-developers. If we replaced SQL with some abstract language, what language would you use when talking to the database directly (via psql, sqlplus, or whatever)? Would you need to learn the PythonQuery, JavaQuery, and C#Query languages separately? Would the language used in ETL tools be different still? What language would you write database views, triggers, functions in?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:For Want of a JOIN by bb88 on Thursday December 22, 2022 @03:44PM (#34098399)

Have you looked at Quel? We have multiple languages to run our code on generic CPUs (C, Python, Java, Ada, Go, Rust, Lisp, etc.) Why must we have only one database language that doesn't do a very good job at Codd's relational calculus?

So many people have drank the kool-aid that SQL is the answer. Maybe it's time to change this.

The success of ORM's could be thought as the market voting against SQL.

https://www.holistics.io/blog/quel-vs-sql/

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:For Want of a JOIN by Kwpolska on Thursday December 22, 2022 @04:25PM (#34098935)

The blogspam post you linked has zero examples of QUEL. Looking at Wikipedia [0], it seems much uglier and less readable than SQL.

I am not a database theory person. I'm a developer who does not care about Codd's relational calculus. As for ORMs, they are great at solving simpler problems and CRUD data access, and they make the developer’s life easier by giving them nice objects to work with as opposed to raw database rows. However, any advanced analytics/reporting/summary queries tend to look awful with an ORM.

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

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:For Want of a JOIN by bb88 on Thursday December 22, 2022 @04:38PM (#34099107)

I was hoping you would address the points about composability rather than turning it into a beauty contest between the two languages.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:For Want of a JOIN by jasonhansel on Thursday December 22, 2022 @04:24PM (#34098928)

SQL actually isn't all that transferable, because in practice you almost always use an ORM or a query builder instead of writing queries directly into your codebase. So when switching languages you still need to learn the new language's ORM; your knowledge of the underlying SQL will only go so far.

Of course queries should be human-readable, but there's no need for it to be a complete language with its own grammar and templating via prepared statements. The queries could be encoded in JSON or some similar (probably custom) human-readable language that can easily be generated programmatically. MongoDB does this IIRC; it's probably the only thing I like about Mongo, but it's a good idea.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:For Want of a JOIN by efficax on Thursday December 22, 2022 @04:57PM (#34099356)

in my experience most engineering shops that care about database perf are not using ORMs except for the most generic CRUD features. you gotta handroll your queries with an eye on EXPLAIN once you pass a billion rows in your tables, in my experience anyway

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:For Want of a JOIN by billythemaniam on Thursday December 22, 2022 @06:47PM (#34100553)

My experience as well. ORMs are really nice in the beginning, they save a lot of boilerplate code. But they become the enemy once scale and/or performance become an issue.

[ Parent | on HN ]