[ryanworl]

It would be tough to implement every SQL construct on top of what is there today. I could explain why (I have tried and presumably ran into the same issues they did described in various areas in the docs and the paper), but the docs give an authoritative answer to save me typing :)

"In the future it is possible that the Record Layer may develop a formal query language, but it is unlikely that such a language would closely resemble the SQL standard." [0]

[0] https://foundationdb.github.io/fdb-record-layer/FAQ.html

[dman]

Could you briefly describe the challenges you ran into?

[ryanworl]

* Schema evolution and schema management. Keeping schema state updated transactionally for a single, high-traffic table is complicated. An FDB core feature I requested could make this easier. Basically managing the lifecycle of adding, building, using, and dropping indexes is the hard part.

* Full table scans on large tables in a R/W transaction would fail due to the 5s transaction duration restriction. This is obviously a bad idea regardless of database, but if you wanted to support SQL you would have to allow it

* Sorting and joins require (theoretically) the same amount of memory as your data size, or the ability to spill to disk. This isn't FDB specific, but offering this kind of feature in a scale-out, high-concurrency model would be tough for QoS.

There are plenty more, but those are the big ones I ran across during design. The actual SQL interface part is not hard, but you would have to disallow many useful constructs people normally expect to work.