Hacker News Reader

Comment by bachmeier | Hacker News Reader

As I commented on a recent similar discussion, these tools can't be used for update or insert. As useful as querying might be, it's terribly misleading to claim to "run SQL" if you can't change the data, since that's such a critical part of an SQL database.

View on HN

What you're really saying is that the database presented in OP is not useful because it only handles DQL.

1. SQL can be thought of as being composed of several smaller lanuages: DDL, DQL, DML, DCL.

2. columnq-cli is only a CLI to a query engine, not a database. As such, it only supports DQL by design.

3. I have the impression that outside of data engineering/DBA, people are rarely taught the distinction between OLTP and OLAP workloads [1]. The latter often utilizes immutable data structures (e.g. columnar storage with column compression), or provides limited DML support, see e.g. the limitations of the DELETE statement in ClickHouse [2], or the list of supported DML statements in Amazon Athena [3]. My point -- as much as this tool is useless for transactional workloads, it is perfectly capable of some analytical workloads.

[1] Opinion, not a fact.

[2] https://clickhouse.com/docs/en/sql-reference/statements/dele...

[3] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/athena/latest/ug/functions-opera...

The title is an editorialization. The project is very careful to emphasize that it is for reading data:

> Create full-fledged APIs for slowly moving datasets without writing a single line of code.

Even the name of the project "ROAPI" has "read only" in the name.

Question: I've built something that supports full CRUD, and queries that span multiple data sources with optimization and pushdown

What kind of headline would make you want to read/try such a thing?

(I'm planning on announcing it + releasing code on HN but have never done so before)

Hi Gavin; that sounds interesting! I saw @eirikbakke make a comment about https://www.ultorg.com earlier. It appears to also support editing the underlying data. I'm curious to see how you've each tackled these tricky topics.

Show HN: Read and update Arrow, Parquet and xxxx files using SQL

It works on databases and arbitrary data sources too though

I think it is worth pointing out that this tool does support querying Delta Lake (the author of ROAPI is also a major contributor the native Rust implementation of Delta Lake). Delta Lake certainly supports transactions, so ROAPI can query transactional data, although the writes would not go through ROAPI.

90% of SQL usage, or more, is select in slowly changing data contexts.

Maybe in your database. Do you have any validation of that claim in a larger context?

Purely the power law. That would be an interesting thing to figure out though. Maybe a github crawl.

EDIT: I stand corrected based on github code files (which might better represent application CRUD queries versus use by analysts, more thought required!)

SELECT: 7.3M code results [0]

INSERT: 8.9M code results [1]

UPDATE: 5.5M code results [2]

DELETE: 5.0M code results [3]

[0] https://github.com/search?q=select++extension%3Asql&type=Cod...

[1] https://github.com/search?q=insert++extension%3Asql&type=Cod...

[2] https://github.com/search?q=update++extension%3Asql&type=Cod...

[3] https://github.com/search?q=delete++extension%3Asql&type=Cod...

Reads are easy to cache at various layers (query cache, application, web, etc). Inserts and updates must go to the database.

So even a read-heavy application could have more writes than reads due to caching.

i disagree

Reply on news.ycombinator.com