Comment by jerf
3 months ago
Logic languages are definitely not what I'd expect a relational-first language to look like.
What we learned from Prolog is mostly that starting from an exponentially-complex primitive and then trying to beat it into submission doesn't work at scale. Relational DBs don't have that problem. They do go n-squared and n-cubed and so forth easily, but there are lots of solutions to that as well.
I'm not sure what you mean with "an exponentially-complex primitive". In my opinion, Prolog lets you start with simple relations (n-squared, using your terms) and then enables you to build more complex relations using them.