Comment by IgorPartola

4 days ago

SQL is not just about a table but multiple tables and their relationships. If it was just about running queries against a single table then basic ordering, filtering, aggregation, and annotation would be easy to achieve in almost any language.

Soon as you start doing things like joins, it gets complicated but in theory you could do something like an API of an ORM to do most things. With using just operators you quickly run into the fact that you have to overload (abuse) operators or write a new language with different operator semantics:

  orders * customers | (customers.id == orders.customer_id | orders.amount > Decimal(‘10.00’)

Where * means cross product/outer join and | means filter. Once you add an ordering operator, a group by, etc. you basically get SQL with extra steps.

But it would be nice to have it built in so talking to a database would be a bit more native.

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IgorPartola

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sgarland  4 days ago

Every time I see stuff like this (Google’s new SQL-ish language with pipes comes to mind), I am baffled. SQL to me is eminently readable, and flows beautifully.

For reference, I think the same is true of Python, so it’s not like I’m a Perl wizard or something.

  • IgorPartola  3 days ago

    Oh I agree. The problem is that they are two different languages. Inside a Python file, SQL is just a string. No syntax highlighting, no compile time checking, etc. A Kwisatz Haderach of languages that incorporates both its own language and SQL as first class concepts would be very nice but the problem is that SQL is just too different.

    For one thing, SQL is not really meant to be dynamically constructed in SQL. But we often need to dynamically construct a query (for example customer applied several filters to the product listing). The SQL way to handle that would be to have a general purpose query with a thousand if/elses or stored procedures which I think takes it from “flows beautifully” to “oh god who wrote this?” Or you could just do string concatenation in a language that handles that well, like Python. Then wrap the whole thing in functions and objects and you get an ORM.

    I still have not seen a language that incorporates anything like SQL into it that would allow for even basic ORM-like functionality.