Re: Proper relational database?

On Fri, Apr 22, 2016 at 1:05 AM, Guyren Howe <guyren(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:

>
> A brief review of it says it would be better than SQL, but then almost
> anything would be. But the syntax looks a bit… baroque. Quell similarly.
>
> If I had the time and money to put together a team to do this, I would
> start with the lower-level guts of either Postgres or SQLite (or, heck,
> MySQL) so you had a thing that did BTrees and other data structures on disk
> and indexes, and provide access to that from a high level, portable and
> efficient language. Perhaps Scheme.
>
> Then you could write a high-level relational logic engine on top of that,
> in the high level language, perhaps with the odd bit of C or D or Go for
> anything really critical.
>
> I don't know if Postgres exposes the lower-level stuff to plugins or not —
> it would be nice if this could be an alternative query language for
> Postgres itself, but the assumptions about the two worlds (SQL vs a
> properly relational store) are probably too different.
>
> As I say, it amazes and somewhat depresses me that someone isn't doing
> this. The NoSQL movement shows that the world is ready for change. Someone
> should be offering folks something better than bloody MongoDB.
>
> And the project could adopt the spirit of the good parts of the NoSQL
> movement. I should be able to have a lightweight, distributed
> schema-on-demand, eventually consistent etc etc *relational* data store.
>
> Please don't get me wrong. I *adore* Postgres. It is for most projects
> hands-down the best data store available. It's just tragic that this
> amazing project is so wedded to the awfulness that is SQL.
>
> I wrote about such issues at a bit more length at
> http://relevantlogic.com/2015/11/04/no-sql-is-fixing-the-wrong-problem.html
>

​I am not a developer, but one thing interesting about SQLite is that it
appears to "compile" the SQL into a virtual machine language (ala Java &
byte code), then execute that. Now, if someone wanted to & had the talent,
it might be interesting to have another language which would compile into
the same VM language and so be executable by the SQLite VM interpreter. I
don't know if PostgreSQL does something similar or not. It may do a SQL to
VM, like Python. Or it may do something else. I need to read the
"internals" documentation on the web site.​

--
"He must have a Teflon brain -- nothing sticks to it"
Phyllis Diller

Maranatha! <><
John McKown