[Discuss] SQL discussion

[Richard Pieri]

On 1/13/2015 8:08 AM, markw at mohawksoft.com wrote:
> I'm a software engineer and I am constantly confounded by other engineer's
> trepidation/apprehension/dislike for the common database. SQL databases
> especially.

This statement of yours is a lot of it. There ain't no such thing as a 
SQL database yet people like you who should know better talk and write 
like they're real things. Those who don't know better are lead down the 
path of equating SQL with 800 pound gorilla database systems. They look 
at NoSQL/NoREL databases as alternatives because they need neither the 
bulk nor the expense of big RDBMS.

The rest of us just roll our eyes.

SQL is a database interface language. It was designed specifically for 
use with relational tables. SQL is very good at this but it can be used 
with pretty much any underlying database technology. As I've noted 
before, most non-relational database vendors provide SQL bindings for 
their systems.

On the other foot, SQL is absolutely terrible for queries against 
unstructured and multi-dimensional data. It's difficult to implement 
queries against these kinds of data with SQL. Such queries are much more 
complex in SQL than their native equivalents and they are much slower as 
a direct consequence of this complexity.

-- 
Rich P.