The tragedy of SQL

A fun philosophical discussion.

I am no fan of “worse is better”, and particularly its poster child, SQL.

The world’s economic output would be substantially higher (5%?) if our industry had settled on almost anything other than SQL for relational databases.

So much of the design of *almost everything* in our industry is a reaction to SQL. ORMs fucking *everywhere* so you don’t have to use SQL. Bad query and database design. Inefficient system designs that use ORMs rather than relations. NoSQL databases. Countless hours on hours of developer time trying to work out how to write something in SQL that would be trivial in, say, Datalog.

If I had $5 million to invest in a startup, I would hire as many of the core Postgres devs as I could to make a new database with all the sophistication of Postgres but based on Datalog (or something similar). (Or maybe add Datalog to Postgres). If that could get traction, it would lead in a decade to a revolution in productivity in our industry.