On 22 April 2016 at 07:05, Guyren Howe <guyren@gmail.com> wrote:
> As I say, it amazes and somewhat depresses me that someone isn't doing this.
> The NoSQL movement shows that the world is ready for change. Someone should
> be offering folks something better than bloody MongoDB.
>
> Please don't get me wrong. I *adore* Postgres. It is for most projects
> hands-down the best data store available. It's just tragic that this amazing
> project is so wedded to the awfulness that is SQL.
Can I make a counter-argument?
SQL is excellent for beginners and adequate for most users. The basic
syntax of SQL (enough that people can produce useful queries with it)
can be presented and understood by a novice in an afternoon. I would
balk at the idea of trying to present the sort of syntax that appears
on the ANDL website to people who aren't programmers, which (I'd be
tempted to suggest) is a significant proportion of the userbase of
SQL.
The fact that ORMs are horrible and involve far too much work to
maintain isn't the fault of SQL, it's the fault of the people who
believe that they have to have their data fed to them by an ORM,
because of this idea (that has sadly propagated widely) that the
separation of code from the data is somehow helpful (as is probably
obvious I'm yet to be convinced of that!).
The world is not "ready for a change". I think of NoSQL as being like
Kim Kardashian: it gets an awful lot of publicity without providing
much justification for it; it brings a lot of column inches without
giving anything of substance in return and a lot of people talk about
it an awful lot without really knowing much about it at all.
There's a (very) small set of users for whom NoSQL makes a lot of
sense. Most of those are large corporations with huge budgets for
development, or academics who can afford to spend many hours tweaking
and figuring out their optimum storage requirements. The average SQL
user, on the other hand, just wants something that brings consistent
data storage for their database that probably numbers in the tens of
thousands of records at most (and if it scales to tens of millions
then great).
Geoff