Re: Can we go beyond the standard to make Postgres radically better?

On Thu, Feb 10, 2022 at 10:54 AM Merlin Moncure <mmoncure(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:

> On Wed, Feb 9, 2022 at 11:15 PM Guyren Howe <guyren(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>
>> - *Also nested function definitions, so top-level functions can be
>> built out of local auxiliary functions.*
>> - *Other languages*
>> - *Tutorial D, Datalog, Quell, let’s open this puppy up!*
>> - *SQL is a terrible, no good, very bad language*
>>
>> Postgres used to suport QUEL way back in the day. Being blunt, there is
> zero chance of this happening in core. A query language translator out of
> core, preprocessing the language into SQL, might work. SQL has evolved
> far beyond what those languages could practically offer. Main benefit
> here would be to better support relational division, which bizarrely has
> yet to arrive in SQL.
> *A portable, low-level API*
>

FYI, there was a semi-serious commercial attempt to do this back in 2001,
Dataphor. It's been opensourced. Wikipedia has a pretty good write up on
it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dataphor

IMNSHO suggestions like these should travel this technical path; take the
data language you want and translate it into SQL. Some of these
translations will end up being complicated (read: slow). Iterating this
kind of thing outside of core would allow for faster development.

merlin

>