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Comment by paulhodge | Hacker News Reader

It's 2020 not 1995. There are already lots of good, production-ready SQL alternatives out there. There's full-fledged businesses that have zero lines of SQL.

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What are good production ready alternatives for SQL? (That are still relational and doesn't make you rewrite half of the database logic again in each new backend you make -- not talking about key/value stores)

I would like to hear of one such business. Can you give an example?

Stripe's primary datastore is mongodb.

But what does their BI tooling use?

NoSQL databases are non-relational.

Anything that uses Activerecord

Isnt ActiveRecord using SQL behind the scenes?

Technically ActiveRecord uses Arel, which in turn compiles, if you will, to SQL. Arel (a strict subset of) could theoretically be an alternative to SQL, if databases supported it as a native language. They don't, so the SQL step is a practical requirement.

This is similar to the browser (especially in the pre-WASM days). No matter what language you actually wrote your software in, eventually you were going to end up converting it to Javascript out of necessity. Would you still say that your program written in C, compiled with emscripten, was written in Javascript?

Misses the point. Sure, we have alternatives, and always have had alternatives to SQL. But those don't address the bazillions of lines of SQL already running almost every important business system. SQL won't just go away because we can point out it's flaws or come up with something we think works better.

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