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Comment by ignoramous | Hacker News Reader

> ...seems we have spent a significant amount of effort avoiding it, but it time and time again is the best way to query your data.

It isn't that SQL is the best way (that these solutions keep gravitating towards it), it is just that SQL is pretty much the industry standard at this point. And supporting it is a predictable and usual ploy to expand userbase further.

More so for the fact that ClickHouse continues to threaten seemingly a critical portion of the business of both Snowflake and Elastic.

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What query languages have you found that are better than SQL?

[edit] Typo.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/data-explorer/kusto/... gets linked here from time to time, along with this similar one https://github.com/prql/prql. I'm not sure either one claims SQL parity at this point but one thing they each have going for them is queries start with the entities, rather than the columns, which makes type-ahead completion more natural.

I think if you were going to do SQL over you would probably do it that way. SQL is definitely not perfect or optimal, just ubiquitous.

Datalog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datalog , it’s a prolog “subset” and is a lot like SQL in the “query by way of a serious of desired parameters reducing the result set” and also not at all handcuffed to the relational paradigm… so its basically relevant as a query language anywhere you have data… relational db, graph db, document db. Datalog doesn’t care.

For anyone with a python background, you can see a good example of (and experiment with) using Datalog style “logic programming” to query existing SQL databases, by checking out the pyDatalog package https://sites.google.com/site/pydatalog/ … keep in mind the level of abstraction in this library, it’s a great place to get familiar with what you could get from Datalog, but working with a database that natively supported Datalog, and had a Datalog query compiler/optimiser would be even more powerful.

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