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Comment by summerlight

1 year ago

Previous submissions on the paper itself:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41321876 (first) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41338877 (plenty of discussions)

I tried this new syntax and this seems a reasonable proposal for complex analytical queries. This new syntax probably does not change most simple transactional queries though. The syntax matches the execution semantic more closely, which means you less likely need to formulate query in a weird form to make query planner work as expected; usually users only need to move some pipe operators to more appropriate places.

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summerlight

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FridgeSeal  1 year ago

Kinda looks like a half-assed version of what PRQL does. Like, if we’re going to have nonstandard sql, let’s just fix a whole bunch of things, not just one or two?

  • summerlight  1 year ago

    > Like, if we’re going to have nonstandard sql, let’s just fix a whole bunch of things, not just one or two?

    I think they intentionally kept themselves away from massive redesign of the languages, which has a good chance of becoming multi decades of frustrating death march. I know a number of such cases from C++ standard proposals and probably the team wanted to avoid it.

  • chubot  1 year ago

    This is addressed in the paper -- it's nice to have something deployable in existing SQL languages, and it also doesn't rule out using PRQL

  • hn_throwaway_99  1 year ago

    > Kinda looks like a half-assed version of what PRQL does. Like, if we’re going to have nonstandard sql, let’s just fix a whole bunch of things, not just one or two?

    To be honest, this feels exactly like the kind of mistake that IPv6 made. It wasn't just "let's extend the IPv4 address space and provide an upgrade path that's as incremental as possible", it was "IPv4 has all these problems, lets solve the address space issue with a completely new address space, and while we're at it lets fix 20 other things!" Meanwhile, over a quarter century later, IPv4 shows no signs of going away any time soon.

    I'd much rather have an incremental improvement that solves 90% of my pain points than to reach for some "Let's throw all the old stuff away for this new nirvana!" And I say this as someone that really likes PRQL.