Re: Dreaming About Redesigning SQL

The world rejoiced as mascarm_at_mascari.com (Mike Mascari) wrote:
> It's a very provocative read. At a minimum, one can learn what to
> avoid with SQL. The language looks neat on paper. Perhaps one day
> someone will provide an open source implementation. One could envision
> a "D" project along the same lines as the same sort of project that
> added SQL to Postgres...

I think you summed it up nicely. The "manifesto" is a provocative, if painful, read. It is very useful at pointing out "pointy edges" of SQL that might be wise to avoid.

I'm not thrilled with the language; I think they have made a mistake in trying to make it too abbreviation-oriented. They keep operator names short, to a fault.

As you say, the most likely way for a "D" to emerge in a popular way would be by someone adding the language to an existing database system.

There is a project out on SourceForge for a "D implementation," called "Duro." It takes the opposite approach; the operators are all defined as C functions, so you write all your code in C. It uses a data store built atop Berkeley DB.

I think an implementor would be better off using an SQL database underneath, and using their code layer in between to accomplish the "divorce" from the aspects of SQL that they disapprove of. Sort of like MaVerick, a Pick implementation in Java that uses a DBMS such as PostgreSQL as the underlying data store.

You do a "proof of concept" by building something that translates D requests to SQL requests. And _then_ get a project going to put a "D parser" in as an alternative to the SQL parser. (Yes, that oversimplifies matters. Tough...)

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