Re: Dreaming About Redesigning SQL

After takin a swig o' Arrakan spice grog, seunosewa_at_inaira.com (Seun Osewa) belched out...:
> This is for relational database theory experts on one hand and
> imlementers of real-world alications on the other hand. If there was
> a chance to start again and design SQL afresh, for best
> cleaness/power/performance what changes would you make? What would
> _your_ query language (and the underlying database concept) look
> like?

There are two notable 'projects' out there:

1. There's Darwen and Date's "Tutorial D" language, defined as part of their "Third Manifesto" about relational databases.
2. newSQL <http://newsql.sourceforge.net/>, where they are studying two syntaxes, one based on Java, and one based on a simplification (to my mind, oversimplification) of SQL.

The "newSQL" project suffers from their definition being something of a "chip away everything that doesn't look like an elephant" definition. They aren't defining, in "mathematical" terms, what their language is supposed to be able to express; they are instead defining a big grab-bag of minor syntactic features, and seem to expect that a database system will emerge from that.

In contrast, "Tutorial D" is _all_ about mathematical definition of what it is supposed to express, and the text is a tough read, irrespective of other merits.

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