Hacker News Reader

Comment by miohtama | Hacker News Reader

How about instead of making AI wrappers to over 50 years old SQL, we’d make a database query language that’s easier to read an write?

View on HN

In general, if something has been around for a very long time and nobody apparently seems to have thought to improve it, then odds are the reason is it's pretty good and genuinely hard to improve on.

in other words, SQL is a shark, not a dinosaur

The Shark Query Language

Codd himself had loads of complaints about SQL.

Well, if you think about it, a huge percentage of dinosaurs survived (birds), and for the rest, can you really fault them for going extinct when a humongous boulder hit the planet?

> pretty good and genuinely hard to improve on

I think that might be a bit more positive than I would be. Broadly speaking, I think you could say that the downsides of the legacy technology in question aren’t larger than the collective switching costs.

But I’d definitely agree that when something has been around that long, it’s prob not all bad.

Because SQL is a good query language, if you bother to really learn it.

https://prql-lang.org/ might be an answer for this. As a cross-database pipelined language, it would allow RAG to be intermixed with the query, and the syntax may(?) be more reliable to generate

I'm watching Edgeql, I feel it could end the career of AI query generators, ORMs and low end BI.

https://www.edgedb.com/

My fear with this approach is that the first implementation would be severely handicapped compared to SQL, amd it'd take years to support some one-off need for any organizational user, so it'd never be fully utilized.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com