Really intriguing article about a SQL syntax extension that has apparently already been trialed at Google.
As someone who works with SQL for hours every week, this makes me hopeful for potential improvements, although the likelihood of any changes to SQL arriving in my sector before I retire seems slim.
I lile this a lot. This reminds me a lot of KQL (a microsoft query language that’s used for a bunch if azure logging).
I use a lot of python pandas/dask- I’ve definitely got used to viewing a table as a series of operations to perform rather than the kind of declarative queries you get in SQL.
At what point is it no longer SQL? If we’re changing fundamental stuff, I’d love a way of writing loops or if statements that isn’t painful too.
Stored Procedures have been a thing for literally decades. But they’re an absolute pain.
What would really improve the usefulness of databases are autoindexes and generally more “let me handle that for you”. I’d argue 90% of business apps essentially need a way to store objects and their relationships, but doing that in an efficient manner is really hard (at least if you’ve got a few more rows to handle).
SQL has pretty powerful conditional support support already and lateral joins are essentially loops if you’re unfamiliar with them.