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#sql#https#language#query#com#going#designed#don#better#code

Discussion (9 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

scythmic_waves•about 1 hour ago
Some overlap here with some of my favorite essays on why SQL is lacking:

https://www.scattered-thoughts.net/writing/against-sql

That particular post ends with a wish-list of items so it's the most similar to the OP. But there are others on the site that I quite enjoy (click on the home icon and search "SQL" on the page).

My personal take is that SQL will continue to reign for a long time because of the how monumental the task of replacing it is due to the inherent complexity of databases. LLMs make this worse because they're really good at translating prose to SQL. Now that it matters less how annoying SQL is to programmers, SQL will become more like assembly over time: something mostly computers write because it's complicated for humans to deal with directly. This is deeply ironic given that SQL was ostensibly designed to read like prose, i.e. to be easy for humans.

ljm•18 minutes ago
Rawdogging SQL when you're not a seasoned DB administrator basically makes an arcane art look occult.

Most people reach out towards an ORM or query building engine and otherwise don't really go far beyond the basic CRUD, joins, and some simple aggregations with groups. Since they try to be DB agnostic you'll rarely get an adaptor over CTEs or window functions or partitioning.

An LLM is great at exposing what a database is capable of doing with SQL and might even manage to navigate the most poorly designed of schemas. And it might even manage to design one to an acceptable standard if it has enough domain knowledge in its context.

mcc1ane•about 1 hour ago
https://www.geldata.com/blog/we-can-do-better-than-sql

(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24106608, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19871051)

zoolo•about 1 hour ago
Check out CodeQL, it's a modern relational query language based on Datalog.
bastawhiz•about 1 hour ago
As a meta comment, I can handle code blocks without syntax highlighting, and I can handle code blocks that wrap. But both together with long comments just turn into line noise. There's no longer any useful visual signal for how to read them. On my phone the code blocks are simply impossible to meaningfully parse.
bri-holt•about 1 hour ago
This is an ultra compact relational query language designed for LLMs. https://memelang.net/11/
a2ff6eeb0•about 1 hour ago
What benchmarks did they use? It seems like on larger tasks, having the LLM be familiar with the language through a large volume of training data will compactness and tenseness.

See https://danluu.com/pl-tokens/

a2ff6eeb0•about 1 hour ago
This would have been interesting about a decade ago, but today AIs all know SQL, and I haven't written it myself in a while.

Since it seems like the quantity of training data dominates AI performance, and AI doesn't yet internalize experience with new tools, it seems like a bad idea to stray from the training set.

Without repeatable benchmarks, it feels like obsessing over a language's syntax and semantics feels a little like debating whether you write assembly using AT&T or Intel syntax.

ModernMech•about 1 hour ago
AIs would benefit from better query languages for the same reasons people would.
a2ff6eeb0•9 minutes ago
The difference is that the bulk of what an AI knows is baked in when it's trained, at least for now. There's no way for it to learn a language and improve with it.
esafak•about 1 hour ago
Database engineers have to be the change they want to see and add support for newer query languages.
flir•25 minutes ago
The early-2ks crop of NoSQL solutions have all got SQL baked in now, haven't they?

Maybe when they've achieved wide adoption for a better language than SQL, they can work on getting rid of qwerty keyboards...

convolvatron•26 minutes ago
that is a pretty difficult place to apply leverage. if you don't support SQL you're at a big competitive disadvantage. because its a weird design with lots of sharp edges that's going to take a lot of your time - customers are going to be unhappy that you don't support the knobs and frills from their existing environment.

so you can certainly float an alternate QL on top of the same base, but its going to be hard to drive uptake. you can translate SQL to your internal variant, but oddities like group by are going to twist your internal model.

at this point I think its more interesting to start to deconstruct these large software systems like OSes and databases and move the composition of systems down a step.