Re: Is there really no interest in SQL Standard?

Christopher Browne <cbbrowne(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
> The nearest sort of thing that *could* conceivably be sensible would
> be to participate in UnQL
> <http://www.unqlspec.org/display/UnQL/Home>. That's early enough in
> its process that it's likely somewhat guidable, and, with the
> popularity of NoSQL, being at the "ground breaking" of a common query
> language to access that would likely be useful to us.

Quite franckly, the thing that SQL was meant to provide is the ability
for non programmers to grok and use the language by themselves. I'm yet
to see that happen anywhere, all I see is developers and DBA that learn
yet another programming language, which has a lot of strengths and its
share of weaknesses too.

My feeling here is that if we want to offer something else than our
current SQL syntax support to the NoSQL people, we should expose the
PostgreSQL system as a programming facility. Build a kind of a more
classic programming language that would use our engine inside, etc.

Here's and example of such a system, with some lisp and prolog
interfaces on top of transactional data access semantics.

http://software-lab.de/doc/ref.html#dbase

IOW, I don't believe in another SQL standard, we're good enough at
pushing the current one (wCTE being the last incantation of that, but
all the custom types and extensibility are there too, building a kind of
a generic or polymorphic type system, with custom operator support,
etc).

Regards,
--
Dimitri Fontaine
http://2ndQuadrant.fr PostgreSQL : Expertise, Formation et Support