On Tuesday, 14 September 2021 14:06:13 BST Merlin Moncure wrote: > On Tue, Sep 14, 2021 at 12:32 AM Guyren Howe <guy...@gmail.com> wrote: > > If I had $5 million to invest in a startup, I would hire as many of the > > core Postgres devs as I could to make a new database with all the > > sophistication of Postgres but based on Datalog (or something similar). > > (Or maybe add Datalog to Postgres). If that could get traction, it would > > lead in a decade to a revolution in productivity in our industry. > I've long thought that there is more algebraic type syntax sitting > underneath SQL yearning to get out. If you wanted to try something > like that today, a language pre-compiler or translator which converted > the code to SQL is likely the only realistic approach if you wanted to > get traction. History is not very kind to these approaches though and > SQL is evolving and has huge investments behind it...much more than 5 > million bucks. > > ORMs a function of poor development culture and vendor advocacy, not > the fault of SQL. If developers don't understand or are unwilling to > use joins in language A, they won't in language B either. > > merlin Back in the day, within IBM there were two separate relational databases. System-R (which came from San Hose) and PRTV (the Peterlee Relational Test vehicle). As I understand it SQL came from System-R and the optimizer (amongst other things) came from PRTV.
PRTV (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Peterlee_Relational_Test_Vehicle_(PRTV)[1]) did not use SQL, and was never a released product, except with a graphical add-on which was sold to two UK local authorities for urban planning. So there are (and always have been) different ways to send requests to a relational DB, it is just that SQL won the day. -------- [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Peterlee_Relational_Test_Vehicle_(PRTV)
