Re: Dreaming About Redesigning SQL

After takin a swig o' Arrakan spice grog, seunosewa@inaira.com (Seun Osewa) belched out...:
> This is for relational database theory experts on one hand and
> imlementers of real-world alications on the other hand.  If there was
> a chance to start again and design SQL afresh, for best
> cleaness/power/performance what changes would you make?  What would
> _your_ query language (and the underlying database concept) look
> like?

There are two notable 'projects' out there:
1.  There's Darwen and Date's "Tutorial D" language, defined as part    of their "Third Manifesto" about relational
databases.
2.  newSQL <http://newsql.sourceforge.net/>, where they are studying    two syntaxes, one based on Java, and one based
ona    simplification (to my mind, oversimplification) of SQL.
 

The "newSQL" project suffers from their definition being something of
a "chip away everything that doesn't look like an elephant"
definition.  They aren't defining, in "mathematical" terms, what their
language is supposed to be able to express; they are instead defining
a big grab-bag of minor syntactic features, and seem to expect that a
database system will emerge from that.

In contrast, "Tutorial D" is _all_ about mathematical definition of
what it is supposed to express, and the text is a tough read,
irrespective of other merits.
-- 
wm(X,Y):-write(X),write('@'),write(Y). wm('cbbrowne','cbbrowne.com').
http://cbbrowne.com/info/thirdmanifesto.html
DOS: n.,  A small annoying  boot virus that causes  random spontaneous
system crashes, usually just  before saving a massive project.  Easily
cured  by Unix.   See also  MS-DOS,  IBM-DOS, DR-DOS.   
-- from  David Vicker's .plan