Hacker News Reader

Comment by LaPrometheus | Hacker News Reader

Exactly, SQL minimization is a real problem. While there is no canonical form of all SQL in general, it is still possible to reduce Query.

There is some existing work. You might want to look at this one: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/c243/25d76c3ba91388e16085c1...

One problem is that bag semantic chase is very complicated to implement. We are actually working on a new chase algorithm on our SQL formalization right now.

View on HN

I'm sure bags cause some trouble, but I had something much "simpler" in mind. For instance, JOIN elimination is a powerful tool implemented by most modern RDBMS' optimisers.

Take this query:

    SELECT c.*
    FROM customer c
    JOIN address a
    ON c.address_id = a.address_id

With a foreign key on customer(address_id), the above JOIN can easily be proven useless, and thus eliminated. Furthermore, take this query:

    SELECT c.*
    FROM customer c
    LEFT JOIN address a
    ON c.address_id = a.address_id

In this case, we don't even need the foreign key as long as there is a unique constraint on address(address_id).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com