Re: Is there a way to bypass sql?

On Aug 9, 2010, at 11:57 AM, Merlin Moncure wrote:

> On Mon, Aug 9, 2010 at 2:39 PM, samantha <sjatkins(at)mac(dot)com> wrote:
>> I have been digging into NoSQL of late. For navigational queries it would
>> be great if there was a way to bypass SQL and directly pull from an
>> identifier for a record or arbitrary byte stream. Does postgresql directly
>> support such ability? What is the closest that you could come?
>
> You can get pretty close, depending on how you define 'bypass'. For
> example, it is possible to send rich data structures back and forth
> between the client and the server without constructing a SQL text
> string. Those structures still have to be strongly typed in the
> server unless you want to stuff everything into a bytea (which btw I
> think is a terrible idea for most cases). Could you describe in more
> detail what you'd like to do and what (if any) inefficiencies or
> restrictions SQL is imposing that you would like to bypass?

In many OO projects the majority of the work on persistent objects is navigational and inserts with relatively few updates. Queries are usually mainly for initial working set in many such systems and little else. When retrieving an object given a persistent oid it would be better if I didn't need to go through even a prepared statement and especially it would be better if I did not need to translate column values or do subqueries to either construct my OO language object or construct my OO cache entry. One thought is that I could in many cases store the cache entry format directly in a KV store and save a bit.

There is also the interesting case of dynamic OO languages where technically the object fields do not have a defined type to start with.

- samantha