Opinion: moreSQL is real

http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/16399069781/google-moresql-is-real

by willvarfar • 15 years ago

82 15 15 years ago

williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com

dhruvbird• 15 years ago

You can find out more about tokutek here: http://duckduckgo.com/?q=tokutek.com http://www.quora.com/Andrew-Byde/answers/Tokutek

Tokutek• 15 years ago

To expand the MVCC list noted above, MySQL + TokuDB is always in MVCC as well (since version 5.0 last year). Also note that the Quora link describes Fractional Cascading. TokuDB uses Fractal Tree indexes. To learn more about Fractal Tree indexes as opposed to basic LSM, see here - http://www.tokutek.com/2011/09/write-optimization-myths-comp...

tom_b• 15 years ago

I love SQL (stay with me).

I cut my SQL teeth on SQL scripts written by programmers who were mainly Java jockeys. Lots of imperative code built around getting a result set and iterating over it.

I was learning relational programming by playing in SQL cmd lines. And getting massive speed-ups by pushing code back to the SQL engines and out of imperative loops.

I love this style of coding - when you squint just right, it looks (a bunch) like a REPL and exploratory development.

And for that last fact, I will always have a bit of a soft spot for SQL. ANSI, please. Host language interfaces on the side.

jcromartie2• 15 years ago

I came here to say pretty much just this. SQL and declarative relational programming are extremely powerful. The new breed of DBs are throwing away something with a solid mathematical and theoretical foundation.

In fact, I wonder if a lot of the reaction against relational databases stems from a lack of understanding of the declarative style and the underlying relational algebra.

Most of the programmers I have worked with can write Java or C# code just fine, but they do just like you described when writing SQL, which makes SQL seem clunky and perform horribly. On the other hand, when you start thinking in sets, and learn to embrace the query optimizer (it does work) you can stop writing silly SQL code and write beautiful and elegant code that does exactly what you need 99% of the time.

I like Ruby, Clojure, Haskell, JSON, shell scripts, and dang it I like SQL.

weavejester2• 15 years ago

I really don't like SQL.

It doesn't follow the relational model and the syntax is extremely hard to parse.

It was written in an era that was more worried about conserving computing resources than thinking about abstractions.

I've nothing against relational databases, but I wish SQL would hurry up and die :(

cameronh902• 15 years ago

Relational databases have their place, and lots of problems fit onto a relational database very well. But that doesn't mean SQL is a good language. SQL is poor language by many measures, and to make matters worse, nearly all implementations of SQL have all sorts of procedural extensions that just doesn't fit well with declarative relational programming. Also mathematical purity doesn't imply maintainable code. I'm also not really sure that real life SQL databases stick too closely to their mathematical foundations.

And yeah, the optimiser does work, if you know how to play it's games. Yesterday, I was working on a really slow query (13 seconds), and I restructured it in such a way that produced exactly the same output and shouldn't really have had any impact on the performance. However, suddenly the optimiser kicked in and started doing what it should have done in the first place, and the runtime went down to about 0.1s. Note that this isn't just a problem with SQL, you get the same kind of issues in anything declarative or functional, where you're relying on the compiler to select the appropriate algorithm. Awesome when it works... nightmare when it doesn't.

Though a more fundamental problem with current SQL relational databases is locking. If you want an entity from a document/object database, you only need to lock that object, but a given entity stored normally in a SQL DB may be scattered all over the database in lots of tables, requiring loads of various kinds of lock. Plus, SQL acquires locks implicitly in whatever order it feels like (which may be optimiser dependent), which causes deadlocks. Avoiding this requires careful planning and denormalisation, which kills of a lot of the advantages of using SQL in the first place.

zaphar• 15 years ago

Relational databases are awesome. SQL (the ansi standard) is pretty good too. But Rows suck. My data almost never exists as a row in the app. For me the siren call of NoSQL was storage systems that stored and returned my data the way it actually existed in my app. The vast majority of my CRUD apps don't need joins. They need to update an Entity that has a tree like structure. The biggest pain was deserializing that structure into a set of rows and then back again. It's a pain that ORM's tried to fix but caused additional problems. What I really want is a relational database with a sql like query language that isn't stuck in a world of rows.

batista• 15 years ago

"In fact, I wonder if a lot of the reaction against relational databases stems from a lack of understanding of the declarative style and the underlying relational algebra."

That, a thousand times.

Opinion: moreSQL is real

Related Stories