When you dig into it, the powerful idea here is the relational algebra, and its equivalence to a first-orderish logic.
I put up with SQL so I can use relations, and I love Postgres because it has the least bad SQL (by a mile!) But SQL is a terrible, no good, very bad language. I don’t really understand why folks who love the relational model aren’t perpetually up in arms about SQL being their only option. Much better query languages are known and well studied. https://www.scattered-thoughts.net/writing/against-sql <https://www.scattered-thoughts.net/writing/against-sql> I’d love to see Postgres offer say Datalog. But until that Halcyon day, we could at least aggressively extend SQL to make it less awful. > On Feb 10, 2022, at 14:38 , Benedict Holland <benedict.m.holl...@gmail.com> > wrote: > > This is a strange post. Why is SQL bad and how do your reconcile that with > managing 99%+ of all data? It's so bad that we have systems that plug into > sql to query data outside of tables like Athena or Excel. > > Why are you not using pgadmin4? Yes. Psql as a command line isn't great for > humans. It's spectacular for computers though. So we have pgadmin4, which I > would take over any other database ui. > > Do you not want your views to change with underlying base tables changing? Do > a fully specified select. It's better programming anyway. Do you want an api? > That seems like a bad idea (i would never implement it) but you also have a > postgres socket, flask, and sqlalchemy or psycopg2. It would take a few hours > to write your own. Again, please don't do that. You will almost surely lose > user information like who decided to delete your client data and your api > would likely require user privileges to get passed by token (sso would be a > nightmare to authenticate) or simply give root privileges to an api. Both are > honestly really bad. > > Now if postgres had the ability to do schema change tracking with rollback... > now that would be a victory. But there are sort of 3rd party solutions that > sort of work some of the time. It's a hard problem and automated sql > generation, particularly automated schema migrations, are really hard to > build in general and there are specific things that are damn hard to not > break. > > Thanks, > Ben > > > On Thu, Feb 10, 2022, 4:13 PM Bruce Momjian <br...@momjian.us > <mailto:br...@momjian.us>> wrote: > On Thu, Feb 10, 2022 at 06:25:45PM +0100, Peter J. Holzer wrote: > > On 2022-02-10 18:22:29 +0100, Peter J. Holzer wrote: > > > On 2022-02-09 21:14:39 -0800, Guyren Howe wrote: > > > > • SELECT * - b.a_id from a natural join b > > > > □ let me describe a select list by removing fields from a > > > > relation. In > > > > the example, I get all fields in the join of a and b other > > > > than the > > > > shared key, which I only get once. > > > > > > Natural join already does this. > > > > > > My use case for such a feature are tables which contain one column (or a > > > small number of columns) which you usually don't want to select: A bytea > > > column or a very wide text column. In a program I don't mind (in fact I > > > prefer) listing all the columns explicitely, but exploring a database > > > interactively with psql typing lots of column names is tedious > > > (especially since autocomplete doesn't work here). > > > > Forgot to add: I think that the syntax would have to be more explicit. > > It's too easy to mix up > > SELECT * - b.a_id FROM ... > > and > > SELECT *, - b.a_id FROM ... > > > > Maybe > > SELECT * EXCEPT b.a_id FROM ... > > Yes, this was proposed on hackers a few months ago and a patch was > proposed: > > > https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/892708.1634233481%40sss.pgh.pa.us#1f17923ad50a1442867162991c54ead9 > > <https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/892708.1634233481%40sss.pgh.pa.us#1f17923ad50a1442867162991c54ead9> > > The last post was from October of 2021 so you can email the author to > ask about its status. > > -- > Bruce Momjian <br...@momjian.us <mailto:br...@momjian.us>> > https://momjian.us <https://momjian.us/> > EDB https://enterprisedb.com > <https://enterprisedb.com/> > > If only the physical world exists, free will is an illusion. > > >
