HTSQL – A comprehensive navigational query language for relational databases | Hacker News Reader

HTSQL – A comprehensive navigational query language for relational databases

htsql.org

68 pointsnetworked17 comments

This tech / company was profiled a few years ago in the NYT http://mobile.nytimes.com/2011/03/24/business/smallbusiness/...

Essentially no way to profit from it, so the founder gave up

HTSQL forms the basis of RexDB ( https://rexdb.org https://bitbucket.org/rexdb/ https://dist.rexdb.org/packages/ ), which is a very active project. That said, HTSQL is not being commercially supported apart from Prometheus Research's RexDB installations. HTSQL itself is actively maintained but will not see any significant new features. Even so, HTSQL is quite productive to use, will be supported for quite some time for our products and clients, and it's used extensively internally here at Prometheus Research.

The next generation this effort is called Rabbit (MIT licensed) and we will announce it sometime this year or early next year. The RexDB API for Rabbit will be called rex.query (https://bitbucket.org/rexdb/rex.query) and, till Rabbit is fully developed enough to replace HTSQL, rex.query be targeting the HTSQL/PostgreSQL backend.

This could have been great but to be useful to me it would need to have a way to use parameters in DB functions.

I know this is specific so here I go to find the source code and see if it's possible to add this... After 5 pages... No clear way to source code... Meh...

>For works that we would incorporate into our repository, we do require intellectual property assignment. In exchange, we give our word as a open source covenant that we will maintain this work and not take it soley proprietary with your contributions; else, we will release this entire work under the Apache license if future support is not forthcoming. We do not have a contribution agreement yet prepared, but when needed, we intend to model it after the Contributor Agreement, described by Bruce Perens’ The Covenant - A New Approach to Open Source Cooperation.

I guess it's time to go Apache don't you think? You gave you word ;)

Maybe I missed something but I'd rather guess they didn't get many source contributions.

Also I read the promise as being a promise about the contributed code, not the entire codebase.

https://bitbucket.org/prometheus/htsql/ and sure, we could make it Apache licensed if someone outside Prometheus Research wishes to use it.

That said, this code base has reached peak complexity (given the features it has) and would require some significant rework to incorporate even more features. We're moving on to a next generation query language we now call Rabbit.

Still think this is an awesome syntax for exploration and interactive use - the way results are accumulated, respectively shown, is also rather nice even though some particular ways to query data can be harder than in pure SQL.

One extension (for an independent implementation) I'm working on is even more defaults / heuristics for finding paths between tables, such that if you have a HTSQL query with /x.y.z you can leave out the y if it's clear from the context (or set by user preference).

Another thing that's practically missing is a defined standard grammar, the description in the documentation isn't suitable except as guidance.

Interesting and powerful looking, but no releases or significant community activity since 2013? There are some answers in StackOverflow, so it doesn't seem to be dead by any means, but worrisome.

A complete implementation shouldn't need new releases... ever. Is there a bug or feature that is not implemented?

I'm curious what type of development activity people expect to see on a feature-complete system?

Environments change. Operating systems change. Dependenciens change. Bugs are found. Feedback might lead to new features.

There is no such thing as "complete" in software development.

Any project wihout relatively recent commits or releases usually signifies abandonment and makes it worrisome to use, for me at least.

The issues page has many unresolved, even undiscussed, issues:

https://bitbucket.org/prometheus/htsql/issues/

Ok, yes, this one seems pretty bad: https://bitbucket.org/prometheus/htsql/issues/43/csv-export-...

I was unable to reproduce this. Here's a URL that comes close... but it doesn't seem to cause any problems.

http://demo.htsql.org/course.filter(%0A%23%20include%20only%...

Not sure why it's not reflected on the website, but appears to have commits this year:

https://bitbucket.org/prometheus/htsql/commits/all

The patch releases can be found in RexDB's public package server, https://dist.rexdb.org/packages/

The issue tracker is unfortunately private, we fix bugs or implement minor features that materially affect RexDB paying customer's usage of HTSQL.

Gremlin [0] over RDBMS, SQLg [1, 2], is also an interesting take on this problem.

[0] http://tinkerpop.apache.org

[1] https://github.com/pietermartin/sqlg

[2] https://github.com/unipop-graph/unipop

I was wondering if for a REST api, it might be a good idea to provide a htsql endpoint beside regular REST endpoints. E.g. a /htsql/<htsql_expression>; what do people think?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com