Re: Dreaming About Redesigning SQL

After takin a swig o' Arrakan spice grog, seunosewa(at)inaira(dot)com (Seun Osewa) belched out...:
> This is for relational database theory experts on one hand and
> imlementers of real-world alications on the other hand. If there was
> a chance to start again and design SQL afresh, for best
> cleaness/power/performance what changes would you make? What would
> _your_ query language (and the underlying database concept) look
> like?

There are two notable 'projects' out there:

1. There's Darwen and Date's "Tutorial D" language, defined as part
of their "Third Manifesto" about relational databases.

2. newSQL <http://newsql.sourceforge.net/>, where they are studying
two syntaxes, one based on Java, and one based on a
simplification (to my mind, oversimplification) of SQL.

The "newSQL" project suffers from their definition being something of
a "chip away everything that doesn't look like an elephant"
definition. They aren't defining, in "mathematical" terms, what their
language is supposed to be able to express; they are instead defining
a big grab-bag of minor syntactic features, and seem to expect that a
database system will emerge from that.

In contrast, "Tutorial D" is _all_ about mathematical definition of
what it is supposed to express, and the text is a tough read,
irrespective of other merits.
--
wm(X,Y):-write(X),write('@'),write(Y). wm('cbbrowne','cbbrowne.com').
http://cbbrowne.com/info/thirdmanifesto.html
DOS: n., A small annoying boot virus that causes random spontaneous
system crashes, usually just before saving a massive project. Easily
cured by Unix. See also MS-DOS, IBM-DOS, DR-DOS.
-- from David Vicker's .plan