Comments on: How did SQL get so popular?

By: Adam Keys

Adam Keys — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 07:32:53 +0000

Great find, Stephan.

By: Stephan Wehner

Stephan Wehner — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 20:20:59 +0000

Quote fom the SQLite home page:

“Think of SQLite not as a replacement for Oracle but as a replacement for fopen().”

http://www.sqlite.org/about.html

Stephan

By: Adam Keys

Adam Keys — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 22:51:38 +0000

@Chris, I think many folks also struggle with thinking in sets, which is pretty crucial to getting down with SQL.

By: Chris

Chris — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 13:00:19 +0000

1) SQL is NOT relational…it was first designed off of the Relational Model, but it is not relational (ie: duplicates)

2) Most programmers these days are taught and accustomed to an imperative style of programming. SQL, being a declarative style comes off as being more difficult. However, this is due to the short sightedness of realizing that declarative code is less prone to errors and is more robust.

By: Adam Keys

Adam Keys — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 00:28:12 +0000

@Simon I originally used verbatim C APIs, but changed it to look like a scripting language to reflect modern practice. Even then, amongst Ruby, Python and PHP, only Ruby gives you a better abstraction than C. Last time I used the others, you had to drag file descriptors (or something like them) around.

It’s an excellent point that SQL is valuable because it maps well to the relational model. As was pointed out on Hacker News, SQL also abstracts the programmer away from nasty things like references and sorting.

By: Simon Hawkin

Simon Hawkin — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 00:10:22 +0000

The point of the article seems to be that SQL is better for database manipulations than pure C. Well, duh! It is. SQL was designed as a representation of relational algebra and as such can be used to effectively describe relations.

However, it is very inconvenient for programming work. The level of abstraction it presents does not appear to be a good fit for software development. This is the main reason for the dislike of SQL among developers.

But we have nothing else. Essentially, we use SQL because we need to use relational databases.

By: Adam Keys

Adam Keys — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 21:18:03 +0000

@Ken, those are all excellent points. Thanks for adding some nuance for those who read this far.

@JKF I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s fundamentally superior. But, it does have it’s place. As to the current relational backlash and value judgements, well, you probably shouldn’t go work for Facebook anytime soon ;)

By: JKF

JKF — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 21:08:25 +0000

How about: the relational model is a fundamentally superior way of thinking about data when compared to the network and hierarchical models, and SQL’s success is due to this key fact.

Modern (web-developer) obsession with easy super-scalability and cheapness over data integrity and flexibility has led to a devaluing of what the relational model provides.

By: Ken

Ken — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 20:31:46 +0000

I don’t understand point #1. “ACID” and “relational” are completely orthogonal. I’ve used non-ACID implementations of SQL, and I’ve used ACID non-relational databases. In fact, MyISAM was one of the most popular ways to use SQL for a while (and maybe still is), and it’s not ACID.

I think #2 is part of it, but the answer is really much simpler: there’s a standard SQL with multiple competing implementations, and (in the past 10-15 years) many of them free. As a developer, this is a sign that (a) it’s not going away, and (b) they’re actually going to try to compete.

I’ve used OODBs which were awesome, but I know of only a couple OODBs, and I can only name one which implements (a small part of) OQL. OODBs are awesome to use (if you use their native API), but as soon as there were 2 RDBMSs that used SQL, network effects took over and it became advantageous for everybody to use that.

By: Adam Keys

Adam Keys — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 19:59:11 +0000

@Hendy yeah, “How did relational databases get so popular” would have been a better title. But, most people strongly couple SQL to relational databases anyway. Also, I arbitrarily picked file-based storage because that’s what was available when I learned about databases. Someone coming up to speed today would be faced with even more choices.

@Jeremy I’m saying that the manuals for databases are easier to read than the books on implementing transactional, i.e. ACID, systems. So, people learn those rather than implement their own datastore that provides one or more of the ACID guarantees that a typical relational database does.