Re: Proper relational database?

On Apr 21, 2016, at 13:56 , John McKown <john(dot)archie(dot)mckown(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
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> Just as a curiosity, what do you think of ANDL?
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> http://www.andl.org/welcome-to-andl/ <http://www.andl.org/welcome-to-andl/>
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> The developer has been posting some questions here about interfacing it to PostgreSQL. But he doesn't just want to do a "translate the ANDL language to SQL language"

A brief review of it says it would be better than SQL, but then almost anything would be. But the syntax looks a bit… baroque. Quell similarly.

If I had the time and money to put together a team to do this, I would start with the lower-level guts of either Postgres or SQLite (or, heck, MySQL) so you had a thing that did BTrees and other data structures on disk and indexes, and provide access to that from a high level, portable and efficient language. Perhaps Scheme.

Then you could write a high-level relational logic engine on top of that, in the high level language, perhaps with the odd bit of C or D or Go for anything really critical.

I don't know if Postgres exposes the lower-level stuff to plugins or not — it would be nice if this could be an alternative query language for Postgres itself, but the assumptions about the two worlds (SQL vs a properly relational store) are probably too different.

As I say, it amazes and somewhat depresses me that someone isn't doing this. The NoSQL movement shows that the world is ready for change. Someone should be offering folks something better than bloody MongoDB.

And the project could adopt the spirit of the good parts of the NoSQL movement. I should be able to have a lightweight, distributed schema-on-demand, eventually consistent etc etc *relational* data store.

Please don't get me wrong. I *adore* Postgres. It is for most projects hands-down the best data store available. It's just tragic that this amazing project is so wedded to the awfulness that is SQL.

I wrote about such issues at a bit more length at http://relevantlogic.com/2015/11/04/no-sql-is-fixing-the-wrong-problem.html <http://relevantlogic.com/2015/11/04/no-sql-is-fixing-the-wrong-problem.html>