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by AlisdairO 5154 days ago
Very true. I'm tempted to argue that SQL's English-like syntax was a mistake, but only because I think it makes people think you don't really need to learn it. It's frustrating to see people trash something when they don't even properly understand it - a lot of the database-related blog posts I've seen make the front page of HN would be shot down if they were similarly misinformed about a language like Javascript.

I'm not by any means saying that the NoSQL movement as a whole is a fad - there's good motivations behind some of these products - but a lot of people who are just ignorant also seem to have hopped onto the bandwagon.
2 comments
scott_s 5154 days ago
That was an issue I had with the post: how can "non-relational" be a good thing about CouchDB? If you have relational data, then there's an entire theory (relational algebra) behind ways to interact with it that have clearly defined semantics. I can see that one may decide they don't need that, but I don't see how it's absence can be a good thing. Being non-relational frees CouchDB to provide different kinds of capabilities, but it's those capabilities that are a good thing, not the lack of being relational itself.

Rather, I think the author has confused "relational" with a lot of other properties of relational databased management systems - such as transactions and data integrity guarantees.

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sah 5154 days ago
You're right that I was lumping transactions and data integrity guarantees in with "relational". I was thinking about normalization, and protecting data integrity in ways that lead to joins and transactions.
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itaborai83 5154 days ago
You made me think about something. A CoffeeScript like approach to build a saner language that would sit atop SQL would be something definitely worth having. Maybe this could be the start of the "OnSQL" movement. Just my thoughts.
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scott_s 5153 days ago
Check out Microsoft's LINQ: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb397906.aspx
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j-kidd 5153 days ago
Well, SQLAlchemy is designed just for that. In the words of the author:

> Like "power steering" for SQL. Doesn't teach you how to drive!

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DennisP 5154 days ago
Being able to parameterize table and column names in queries would be a big help.
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itaborai83 5153 days ago
It could have a sharding aware data definition language and some support for "on-the-fly" data migrations.
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