Comment by geezerjay
7 years ago
Blindly asserting that SQL is bad without providing any argument or proof does not contradict OP's opinion on SQL.
7 years ago
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?
The only edge cases I could find in the article were the discussion of nulls... which aren’t so much an edge case as they are just an ever-present problem that no one really notices until it hurts (its not at all difficult to write a broken-on-null query). Is there something else you’re referring to? Afaict, everything else was just trivially observable aspects of the language
>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 :-)
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There are real problems with COBOL and, yet, it's used in the most critical parts of our societal infrastructure. People just learned to live with the problems and are by now completely oblivious to them.
SQL is too broken to even try fixing.
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.
>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
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
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