Comment by asimpletune
7 years ago
I think you mean the relational model is timeless. SQL is simply just not a great language, for an otherwise great idea.
7 years ago
I think you mean the relational model is timeless. SQL is simply just not a great language, for an otherwise great idea.
Blindly asserting that SQL is bad without providing any argument or proof does not contradict OP's opinion on SQL.
Almost anything written by Date and/or Darwen during the last 30 years is stock full of arguments and proofs that SQL is a horrendously poor language. pls don't come complaining that all of those arguments are not replicated here.
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 ???
The article itself gives a pretty decent description of how the language falls down.. and the ggp’s expression of his impression pretty trivially just maps to the relational model/algebra.... so all necessary arguments have been made :-)
really? the article has a handful of strange edge cases that you'll almost never smack into in practice, and that's cause to say the language is crap?
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?
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there's a reason why not everything in SQL is a set and it's that you can do a lot of mathematical work from inside the engines. this was largely overlooked in the article and undefined what operations between set of multiple cardinality would require and if this would result back to what they call unwieldy runtime errors when doing math over set of mismatched cardinality.
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