Comment by JohnBooty | Hacker News Reader

Comment by JohnBooty | Hacker News Reader

"No SQL. It’s 2012, and most queries are run from code rather than by a human sitting at a console. Why are we still querying our databases by constructing strings of code in a language most closely related to freaking COBOL, which after being constructed have to be parsed for every single query? SQL in its natural habitat"

COBOL? Really? I don't see the COBOL connection at all.

SQL is more closely related to relational algebra, so it makes absolute sense when you're querying relational data.

So that's why many of us prefer to query our relational data in SQL. It's the same reason why we write stylesheets in CSS instead of C++... and why we validate postal codes and phone numbers with regular expressions instead of "manually" parsing them with PHP, Ruby, Python, or what have you. It's all about the right tool for the right job.

Relational data isn't the right solution for everything; there are lots of use cases where NoSQL databases absolutely rock and traditional databases are inappropriate. Again, right tool for the right job.

The level of ignorance revealed by that one short quote is just stunning.

I have to wonder whether the author is one of those people who writes SQL that reads like procedural code, full of IFs and WHILEs/cursors. I can't count how many times I've converted application-layer-equivalent code like that into briefer, more readable set-based SQL equivalents that perform thousands of times faster. (I say this as someone who is quite happily using MongoDB in my current personal project - but who will almost certainly be piping that data into PostgreSQL for offline analysis. Right tool for the right job, as GP says.)

The problem with SQL is that everyone thinks they know SQL.

So, on one hand, you have a group of people who think they know SQL well enough and dismiss it as inadequate. These are people who build schema without foreign key and run queries without JOIN because they "know better".

On the other hand, you have a group of people who think they know SQL well enough and fall back to it whenever possible. They go on to create views on top of views on top of views, create temp tables to hold intermediate values that get discarded right away, format application output with string concatenation in SELECT, add DISTINCT to SELECT whenever in doubt, etc etc.

We have an interview question (for a senior position) to test if the applicant grasps the concept of "EXISTS/IN (<subquery>)", and thus the concept of set-based SQL. Nobody has got it right yet, though they all can write a ton of SQL.

The connection I see is the attempt to make the syntax English-like. Expressions like "SELECT * FROM users" remind me of COBOL's "ADD X TO Y".

Which is a completely superficial connection with no relationship to the actual semantics.

Very true. I'm tempted to argue that SQL's English-like syntax was a mistake, but only because I think it makes people think you don't really need to learn it. It's frustrating to see people trash something when they don't even properly understand it - a lot of the database-related blog posts I've seen make the front page of HN would be shot down if they were similarly misinformed about a language like Javascript.

I'm not by any means saying that the NoSQL movement as a whole is a fad - there's good motivations behind some of these products - but a lot of people who are just ignorant also seem to have hopped onto the bandwagon.

That was an issue I had with the post: how can "non-relational" be a good thing about CouchDB? If you have relational data, then there's an entire theory (relational algebra) behind ways to interact with it that have clearly defined semantics. I can see that one may decide they don't need that, but I don't see how it's absence can be a good thing. Being non-relational frees CouchDB to provide different kinds of capabilities, but it's those capabilities that are a good thing, not the lack of being relational itself.

Rather, I think the author has confused "relational" with a lot of other properties of relational databased management systems - such as transactions and data integrity guarantees.

You're right that I was lumping transactions and data integrity guarantees in with "relational". I was thinking about normalization, and protecting data integrity in ways that lead to joins and transactions.

You made me think about something. A CoffeeScript like approach to build a saner language that would sit atop SQL would be something definitely worth having. Maybe this could be the start of the "OnSQL" movement. Just my thoughts.

Being able to parameterize table and column names in queries would be a big help.

It could have a sharding aware data definition language and some support for "on-the-fly" data migrations.

Check out Microsoft's LINQ: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb397906.aspx

Well, SQLAlchemy is designed just for that. In the words of the author:

> Like "power steering" for SQL. Doesn't teach you how to drive!

How is that different from

  for foo in bar

ubiquitous in modern programming languages?

Capital letters.

So SQL is bad because it expresses intent in a language which contains domain concepts?

What would you prefer? Fortran? Assembly?

I didn't say anything about domain-specificity.

My primary point was just that SQL is old, and I think the reason it is the way it is has more to do with history and compatibility than what we'd want it to look like if we started from scratch today.

SQL is still around because it was successful. And there are reasons to value compatibility, and to avoid changing things for no reason. But my personal experience using a database without using SQL was pleasant, and I'm anxious to see the world move on to something new and improved.

There are a lot of things I like about the query interfaces of PetaPoco, ActiveRecord, etc. For simple CRUD operations, they're much prettier and more concise than than embedded SQL - Person.find(123) is a lot nicer than "person = db('select * from person where id=123')"

But beyond very simple cases I feel like non-SQL query interfaces very quickly become terrible, clumsy, leaky abstractions.

I usually try to have the best of both worlds - I create a SQL view/function/sproc containing my big gross gnarly joins, and then query it in a pretty way via the ORM.

I still don't see the similarity. Just about any modern language is full of English keywords - for, while, unless, function, etc.

Unlike COBOL (which I admit to not being very familiar with) SQL uses standard mathematical symbols as operators whenever possible... + instead of "ADD" etc.

Try it without shouting --

     select * from users

Looks more like Haskell now.

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