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

On Fri, Feb 11, 2022 at 12:26 AM Guyren Howe <guyren(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:

> I’m not proposing some crackpot half-baked idea here. There are
> well-defined and researched alternatives to SQL.
>

I didn't suggest that you were. Anything which was written, someone had to
actually write.

> The most fully-developed you-can-use-today offering is Datomic, which uses
> Datalog as its query language. If you know Prolog, and how that is kind of
> database-like, Datomic is pretty much a variant of Prolog.
>
> https://www.datomic.com
>
> I don’t use it because it’s closed source.
>

And being closed-source, it's not useful here. A concrete spec for what
you'd like to see happen at least has potential. A parser that someone has
actually written, more so.

Will it be accepted here? I don't know; I'm not an insider, or in a
position to say. But it'd be a much better pitch than a pep talk, or
speaking in generalities about SQL. And that's coming from someone who
actually agrees with you. I'm 100% on board with the idea that something
better is (badly) needed. But is the idea, here, really to talk a highly
successful project into doing a 180 based on this sort of argument? If
only the people writing the code saw the light, they'd go read the Datomic
site, and start overhauling PostgreSQL?

I've floated a few modest, concrete ideas here, and while the response to
them was conservative, I wouldn't call it closed-minded. The message I've
gotten from Tom Lane was basically, "here are the problems; show me how
this would actually work." I'd have to call that fair; ball's in my
court. Being more ambitious, I'd be pleased with a query language which
used S-expressions. But I think the road ahead for that would be to say,
"Hey, guys, look at this thing I've written. Would you please consider it?"

--
Ray Brinzer