Re: Imperative Query Languages

They said it couldn't be done...
dandl <david(at)andl(dot)org> schrieb am Di. 11. Juli 2017 um 06:58:

> From: pgsql-general-owner(at)postgresql(dot)org [mailto:
> pgsql-general-owner(at)postgresql(dot)org] On Behalf Of Merlin Moncure
>
> > It's probably of broader interest to consider some sort of "more
> relational"
> > language that would, in effect, be "more declarative" as opposed to
> > "more imperative" than SQL. (I'd not be keen on heading back to
> > CODASYL!!!)
> >
> > The notable example of such would be the "Tutorial D" language
> > attributable to Darwen and Date's "Third Manifesto"
> >
> > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D_(data_language_specification)
> > http://wiki.c2.com/?TutorialDee
> >
> > Unfortunately, the attempts to construct implementations of D have all
> > pretty much remained at the "toy" point, experiments that few beyond
> > the implementors seem to treat as realistic SQL successors.
> >
> > Another option, in principle, would be to consider QUEL, which was
> > what Stonebraker used initially as the query languages for Ingres and
> > Postgres.
> >
> > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUEL_query_languages
> >
> > None of these options seem to be dominantly better than SQL, and for
> > something to supplant SQL, it would need to be a fair bit better.
>
> I'd like to see a SQL variant (maybe preprocessed) with an algebraic
> syntax. My biggest gripes with SQL are all the keywords (there are other
> spoken languages than English??) and the unnecessarily irregular syntax.
>
> If you want a comprehensive list of what's wrong with SQL, it's easy
> enough to find. The list is long, but near the top are the failure to
> adhere to the relational model, NULLs, and language design (irregular
> syntax, etc). But SQL is deeply embedded and currently there are no
> competitors in its space. In the academic arena Datalog is preferred, and
> there are solid commercial implementations.
>
> It's easy enough to pre-process your own syntax, and Andl effectively does
> that by generating SQL on Postgres and SQLite. But that doesn't provide
> enough benefits on its own, and displacing SQL from any of the places it's
> currently used is not going to happen any time soon.
>
> Regards
> David M Bennett FACS
>
> Andl - A New Database Language - andl.org
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